2008 ARTEMIS Orchestra Competition
A NICTA/UNSW team has won first place in the ARTEMIS Orchestra competition in Athens with a robotically operated, computer-driven clarinet they jointly developed. NICTA’s win was the culmination of eight months of effort.
The ARTEMIS Orchestra competition challenges contestants to build devices that play real musical instruments, to demonstrate the creative potential of Embedded Systems. Aimed at higher education and universities, the competition is organised by the association of European actors in embedded systems research and development (ARTEMISIA).
The award-winning NICTA/UNSW clarinet was developed by NICTA in partnership with the University of New South Wales. The project team included UNSW Computer Science and Engineering student Mr Mark Sheahan, NICTA Project leader Dr John Judge, and Dr Peter Chubb, who developed the music interpretation software. Mechanical design, construction, and CAD components were provided by UNSW, including Kim Son Dang and Dr Jay Katupitiya from the School of School of Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering and Jean Geoffroy and Paul Santus from the School of Physics. The university’s Professor John Smith and Professor Joe Wolfe respectively contributed electronic and music acoustic expertise. The clarinet will now be used by the UNSW School of Physics’ Acoustics Lab to better understand the gestures of human players.
View full press release.
Watch footage of the Clarinet in action and the winning team.
Full length video (approx. 7 minutes) - MOV. file (17.8MB), wmv.file (20MB)
Short length video (approx. 1 minute) - wmv.file (3.25MB) or mp4.file (3.5MB)
How can I get involved?
NICTA is actively seeking tertiary level student projects that produce robots that play musical instruments, to fund over the course of the 2009 academic year, for entry into the competition in 2010. The musical instrument should be unmodified and the robot should be built according to the rules available from NICTA.
Interested academics from Australian institutions are invited to send a two-page submission to NICTA outlining their proposed project. Suitable projects would be the final year projects of engineering degrees, however submission is not limited to that type of project. The project should be aimed at producing a robot at a level that would be a credible entry into the Artemis Orchestral Competition.
Entries that feature a cross-disciplinary combination of students and academics from the various disciplines required to build both the hardware and software – like the clarinet that won the competition this year - will be favoured. (In 2007 NICTA sponsored the “RoboFiddler” from the University of Adelaide and it was awarded second place in the competition.)
For more information regarding project proposals and rules for robot construction, and sponsorship details, please contact Dr. John Judge at NICTA on John.Judge<at>nicta.com.au.