TechStuff’s Jonathan Strickland pointed me to a feature in Wired today — Cybraphon, the robot band that gets gloomy when it’s not the center of attention. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and an antique galvanometer are all part of Cybraphon’s ability to figure out whether it’s popular at the moment and change its tune accordingly.

It’s an idea as delightful to me as music played on Tesla coils, so it seemed like a good time to follow up on last week’s post on geeky ways to make music — this time with robots. (No, Data doesn’t count, since he is both fictional and an android.) We’ll start with a look at Cybraphon’s demo song — there’s also a whole Cybraphon channel at YouTube.

Kawada’s HRP-2 likes to play the drums. He thinks he’s getting good, but he can handle criticism:

This Toyota robot plays Disney tunes on the trumpet:

Returning to the world of non-humanoids: The Trons, a robot band from New Zealand:

And in the DYI camp, two kids made this musical robot for a project:

Last but not least, Interbots’ Moxi sings Jonathan Coulton’s “Still Alive,” aka “the song from Portal.”

Show me more! If you have favorite musical robots  — or even favorite songs about robots by humans — tell me about it the comments.

We’re doing science and looking at robots at HowStuffWorks.com:
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