Organ Pipe Cactus

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Stenocereus Thurburi (Pipe Organ Cactus) is a sculpture I made that resembles the plant of the same name. The arms of the sculpture are actual organ pipes that play sound. In the base of the sculpture there is a fan and valves that supply air to the pipes. Additionally, the base of the sculpture has ultrasonic range finders pointing out in all directions, which the sculpture uses to determine the number and location of people in its vicinity. This affects the music that it plays. This was commissioned by the Mesa Center for the Performing Arts in Mesa Arizona, and shown at the Spark! festival. It was additionally shown at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA). Moreover, this sculpture was used in a dance performance, documented here.
Image of a cactus Image of a cactus


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Tell Darwin Logo TellDarwin is a command interpreter that I wrote for DARwIn-OP Robot. It allows the robot to be controlled wirelessly from Max/MSP. Not only does the software respond to simple movement commands, but it can stream video as Jitter matricies from the robot's camera, stream audio to/from the robot's speaker/microphone, read the sensors and so forth, all using simple, intuitive commands, like "start video" and "get accelerometer". It was commissioned by the University of Georgia, Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE), and used in a dramatic media class taught through the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at UGA. For more information, the source code, and instructions for use visit the TellDarwin documentation page. You can find even more on the Max/MSP website, Robo Savvy, and robotis.

Singing Bowls

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During my PhD, I built these machines that play Tibetian singing bowls. Each machine has two bowls that are mounted on motors so that they can spin, and a central stick that can move to contact one or the other bowl. This causes the bowl to vibrate, similar to running your finger around the rim of a wine-glass. Each bowl also has a solenoind-controlled hammer mechanism that can strike the respective bowl. The machines are all wirelessly networked together and controlled via a central computer. These machines have been shown in several art installations and musical performances. They have been widely mis-attributed on the internet to some nameless plagarist who has sadly gotten tenure by stealing the work of others and passing it off as his own. I took the video below in the Digital Arts Ranch on the campus of Arizona State University while I was testing them.


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Kiki is a djembe robot that I built at Arizona State University as part of my dissertation. Kiki was built as a platform for studying timbral nuance in musical robots. It can play different timbres, classify a human's timbres, improve its own timbre by listening to a human play, and generate rhythms interactively (respecting the sequence of timbres in the rhythms). How this works is described in detail in my PhD Dissertation
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