Robotic Arm Gives Drummer 5 Limbs (Video)
Researchers at Georgia Tech’s Center for Music Technology are looking to give drummers a third, mechanical arm.
The arm, which is strapped onto a drummer’s shoulder, can keep time with what he’s playing and add a beat to the song. So if the drummer is hitting the high-hat cymbal, the arm will know to move to keep time on the ride cymbal, and when the human moves to the snare drum, the arm moves to the tom drum…The two-foot arm… was programmed using motion-capture images of a human drumming, helping it to imitate the natural movements of a human arm.