What is Pat Metheny's Orchestrion?

Pat Metheny has already worked with most of the world’s most talented musicians, so his newest collaboration project had to branch out a little – he’s making sweet music with robots. The famous jazz guitarist has assembled a remarkable robotic orchestra composed of a room full of solenoid and pneumatically driven instruments. Dubbed The Orchestrion Project, the robot ensemble represents a unique attempt to expand musicality into both automated and directed machines. Each instrument follows input from Metheny, allowing him to improvise with his own unique musical style. Metheny has already produced a record using his robot orchestra and is launching a world tour this month. Check out the delightful press video for The Orchestrion Project by clicking on this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsYEOUKS4Yk

The Orchestrion Project gets its name, and its creative origins, from the mechanically automated orchestras created since the late 1700s. Those early orchestrions expanded on the concept of a player piano allowing for the automated playing of music across multiple instruments. Metheny was inspired by these mechanical ensembles and by the advancing promise of technology. This is a musician who regularly refers to the concepts of Ray Kurzweil to help explain his own work. The creation of mechanical acoustic devices has continued right into the present, but Metheny has taken the idea into a different direction. Rather than simply arrange a musical composition to be played across multiple instruments, he organically builds the voice of each instrument using his improvisational riffs on the guitar. In a sense he’s created a live version of an elaborate over-dubbing studio session wherein he is playing and responding to his improvisation as it is expressed in other instruments. Looks complicated, sounds amazing:
As Metheny describes in related videos on his website, it took a large team of inventors to provide all of the automated instruments in his Orchestrion Project. There’s a Yamaha Disklavier, a bottle ensemble created by the Peterson Company, an electric bass by Ken Caulkins, and many more. Each instrument is acoustic or acoustic-electric, providing for a rich and full sound that synthesizers would be unable to fully mimic in a concert environment.

See it in action at the ASC Friday, October 1 at 8 PM. Tickets are available at the box office. http://alysstephens.uab.edu/events/?id=100