At first glance, it’s easy to think of Frankenstein’s monster when you look at one of the robotic instruments crafted by George Mason University’s Dr. Dan Lofaro and Edgar Endress for their Narrative Machine project. Their shape is familiar, but wires spring every which way and circuit boards are infused on the original moldings; the instruments’ unusual, alien sounds add to that idea. But these professors—Lofaro in the Volgenau School of Engineering, Endress in the School of Art—are no mad scientists, and their creations certainly won’t be ravaging any villages.
This all started when GMU’s Instruments in the Attic initiative, which aims to provide donated instruments to students, approached Endress about repurposing equipment donated that was beyond repair into sculptures.
“When I went to pick them up, I realized, wait one moment, we are going in really stereotypical places,” says Endress. “Why don’t we make robotic instruments or something? … Let’s try to mechanize or do something with them.”
Endress soon met Lofaro, a music lover himself, through the school’s Mason Innovation Exchange and they were off.
Last December, the duo finished their first revitalized instrument, a violin—dubbed the digital theremin violin—featuring a bow with alternating pole magnets and wire coil to help create its sound. They also have a cello drum and three guitar towers thus far. These instruments were shown at an exhibit at the Center for the Arts Concert Hall that ran through January and early February, but Endress and Lofaro have no intention of stopping at five instruments.
With nearly 40 instruments ready to be transformed, the goal is to be able to create their own robotic orchestra, with complete brass, woodwind, string and percussion sections.
“We have all the instruments ready to go,” says Lofaro. “The main thing is we need the money to do it.”
As of right now, Narrative Machine is a side project for Endress and Lofaro, with whatever funding they do have coming from overhead of other grants. Proposals have been submitted to the National Science Foundation and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the pair are awaiting official word on each.
“It will still happen, still working on it,” says Lofaro. “We’ll get another two or three instruments done this year.”
Lofaro already has a few projects he wants to do when the orchestra is ready, including playing a piece of 12th century German music a colleague at Mason has discovered or creating a Christmas album.
“It’s a nice STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics) activity to get arts involved in engineering,” says Lofaro. “We’ll get the art students some new tools to do more creative stuff … and then for the engineering students, it will hopefully bring out the creativity, which is there, it’s just locked away.”
“There is a social manifestation that comes through these devices,” explains Endress of the project’s thematic meaning. “This object functions as a musical instrument, as a form of re-cooperating within our society what we throw away, what we discard. … This is where art for me is stronger, when you manifest the will or the need or the expression of a community, of a group of people, of a social experience. In that context I think this is an innovation.”
