News: Robot organ assembly starting to take shape

[Contrabombarde]

Spotted this press release recently quoted in an international IT journal and thought it would be of wider interest.

"Faced with the relative lack of organ builders in the Far East, years of experience of robotic assembly lines and the growing capability of artificial intelligence, one enterprising start-up has just launched a new service that allows customers to have their dream organ designed and built entirely by robots. The acoustical properties of the building are assessed by recordings of ambience and echo, then artificial intelligence is used to calculate the optimal size of instrument and pipe scaling. Ex-car assembly line retired robots cut the sheet metal and roll it into pipes, and a specialist "robot voicer" takes each pipe and voices it to match one of a dozen or so styles of master voicer, options including Father Willis, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, Gottfried Silbermann, Edvard Schulze, Schnitger and Snetzler. Computer-controlled machining meanwhile assures aviation-standard tolerances in the manufacture of keyboards, action, soundboards and winding. It's estimated that the total build time from signing contract to final installation and sign-off for a typical three manual church organ can be as little as four weeks, and the carbon footprint is reckoned to be half that of a conventional pipe organ."

Sounds incredible - I need to find a link.

[Barry Oakley]

12 minutes ago, Contrabombarde said:

Spotted this press release recently quoted in an international IT journal and thought it would be of wider interest.

"Faced with the relative lack of organ builders in the Far East, years of experience of robotic assembly lines and the growing capability of artificial intelligence, one enterprising start-up has just launched a new service that allows customers to have their dream organ designed and built entirely by robots. The acoustical properties of the building are assessed by recordings of ambience and echo, then artificial intelligence is used to calculate the optimal size of instrument and pipe scaling. Ex-car assembly line retired robots cut the sheet metal and roll it into pipes, and a specialist "robot voicer" takes each pipe and voices it to match one of a dozen or so styles of master voicer, options including Father Willis, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, Gottfried Silbermann, Edvard Schulze, Schnitger and Snetzler. Computer-controlled machining meanwhile assures aviation-standard tolerances in the manufacture of keyboards, action, soundboards and winding. It's estimated that the total build time from signing contract to final installation and sign-off for a typical three manual church organ can be as little as four weeks, and the carbon footprint is reckoned to be half that of a conventional pipe organ."

Sounds incredible - I need to find a link.

April 1st?????????????????????????????????

[MusoMusing]

John Compton would have been terribly interested.

MM