Robotic rock group raises funds to build lead vocalist, record album

By Kelly Hodgkins November 12, 2015

Compressorhead in New York

The members of Compressorhead may look like our long-awaited robot overlords, but these robotic creatures actually are musicians, complete with valve-lifter mohawk hair and gas-mask faces. Comprised (so far) of an accomplished drummer, guitarist, and bassist, the three-man band now is in need of a lead vocalist, and is turning to Kickstarter to fund the building of their front man. Once their lead singer is in place, the band plans to record its first album.

Created by Frank Barnes, Markus Kolb and Stock Plum, Compressorhead differs from other animatronic bands that play pre-recorded music. The band members in Compressorhead play real instruments and play them live. The band has already performed several concerts, making its debut performance in Australia and performing another more recent event in Moscow. Compressorhead currently has three members –the guitarist “Fingers,” who has 78 fingers to shred out the notes on his six-string axe; “Stickboy,” the four-armed drummer; and lastly, “Bones,” the bassist whose movement most closely mirrors those of his human counterparts.

compressorhead-moscow — Compressorhead

Now the team is ready to bring Compressorhead to the next level by adding a lead robot that’ll sing and interact with the crowd. The front man will be equipped with a stainless-steel tracked drive that’ll allow the robot to move across the stage and perform “with special features” for improved crowd interaction. This new presence will help make the band more affable and less, well, robotic to the crowd. The creators of Compressorhead also are working with Canadian music star John Wright to produce a 14-track album that will feature songs written especially for the band.

To fund the development of the new lead vocalist and to pay for the recording cost, the Compressorhead creators have launched a Kickstarter to raise the €290,000 ($318,445) necessary for the project. Besides building a new robot and recording an album, the creators also are developing an app that’ll let fans connect with the band and receive notifications when band members go live. The Kickstarter is live now and will be available until December 5th.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Contributor

Kelly's been writing online for ten years, working at Gizmodo, TUAW, and BGR among others. Living near the White Mountains of…

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Entertainment

AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying

Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Mobile

4 simple pieces of tech that helped me run my first marathon

Garmin Forerunner 955 Solar displaying pace information.

The fitness world is littered with opportunities to buy tech aimed at enhancing your physical performance. No matter your sport of choice or personal goals, there's a deep rabbit hole you can go down. It'll cost plenty of money, but the gains can be marginal -- and can honestly just be a distraction from what you should actually be focused on. Running is certainly susceptible to this.

A few months ago, I ran my first-ever marathon. It was an incredible accomplishment I had no idea I'd ever be able to reach, and it's now going to be the first of many I run in my lifetime. And despite my deep-rooted history in tech, and the endless opportunities for being baited into gearing myself up with every last product to help me get through the marathon, I went with a rather simple approach.