Lindsay Patterson

Somewhere in New York City, you are playing in a quartet.

Except, you are behind your computer - in your home, at your office, or wherever you get on the internet. And your three musical partners are playing in a warehouse-like space on the Lower East Side. And they’re machines.

That means you’re part of the Absolut Quartet, a project sponsored by Absolut Vodka and created by the visionary team of Jeff Lieberman and Dan Paluska.

Lieberman is a bit of a modern-day Renaissance man. He’s a photographer, musician, robotics expert and a prolific inventor. I spoke to Lieberman a few months ago while he was at MIT, finishing up his second Ph.D. dissertation: A wearable robot suit. He soon moved on to work on absolutmachines full time. It premieres in New York City at the end of the month. This week, I caught up with Lieberman via email to pose a few questions about the project.

What’s the idea behind absolutmachines? And what does vodka have to do with it?
Jeff Lieberman: The main idea is that we can envision using machines to enhance the creativity of humans. Right now robots function mostly for industrial automation, but [hopefully] this is just the beginning. We all use tools every day to enhance our creativity - a musician picks up a guitar and is inspired by its sound. Why not use a machine, a robot, to enhance your creativity in other, non-superficial ways?

To put it blankly, vodka has nothing to do with it - Absolut has a good tradition of marketing campaigns where they focus on trying to do something really interesting to get their name out there, instead of trying to directly sell alcohol.

How does the machine allow you to become part of the quartet?

The Absolut Quartet fundamentally uses the online user as the fourth musician - it consists of a robotic ballistic marimba, that throws rubber balls 7′ into the air precisely aimed to hit 42 marimba keys, a wine glass player that has 35 robotic fingers playing tuned wine glasses, and a 9 piece robotic percussion ensemble. The online user logs in, and when their turn comes up, they can play on a graphical piano for several bars, and that music is used as the theme or motif to inspire the machine to play a 2 or 3 minute piece of music. For any different inspiration, the machine will play a new piece of music, that fundamentally expands on the theme in order to turn it into a real, emotional piece of music. Without the online user, the machine has nothing to play.

How is this project different from other types of digital music?

On some level, it’s a fundamentally different project than ‘digital music’. In one sense it’s a great merging of completely digital [it's all internet based and communicated through digital channels] and completely analog [every sound that the machine makes is made on acoustic instruments, and is played in a live space in the lower east side in nyc, where people can come in and watch the event live. Nothing like this has ever been done before, so heavily mixing the analog and digital realms in this way. And really allowing an online user to control a physical and emotional experience that happens in real life.

Where is the line between art and technology in this project?

The use of ‘technology’ has been one of the heaviest topics we’ve been asked about in this project. The ironic thing is that in some sense, there is no line at all. In the renaissance, artists on the forefront of their ‘technology’ would hunt down new materials for better color paints. But, it was still the paint. Technology is paint, it is a paintbrush. It is the means by which our experience is made, but it is not the experience.

What does it mean for machines to be creative creatures?

This is a touchy topic for many - and we are by no means considering that this machine is ‘truly creative’ in the sense that it is ‘thinking on its own.’ However, we developed this machine, came up with the complex set of rules by which people’s input could be combined with underlying structures made by other humans to create new pieces of music, and still the things that come out of it have been totally unexpected at times and beyond what any creator could specifically envision. This for us has been the measure of success; for us, knowing every line of code that goes into the creation, the experience is still sudden, subtle, and surprising.

From your experience as a musician, how is it different to be the creator of a machine that creates music than to sit down and create music yourself? I’m wondering about the connection between your interests in human improvisation, and mechanical inspiration.

For myself personally, it’s all different on some level but more importantly it’s all the same. Sitting down to write a musical composition is the same as solving the ball reloading mechanism in one of the marimba shooting machines. Creation requires focus, improvisation, testing and revision. It requires practice to get better and learn the rules, but sometimes requires dropping the rules. And most importantly, creation is about enabling new experiences. Writing music and designing a machine may have very different time scales, but to me they are fundamentally the same experience, one of creation. Seeing a new painting, hearing a new music piece, or seeing a robot do something that you thought was impossible, are all new experiences that we as artists can enable for other humans. Having people walk into the machine space, look at the machine for thirty seconds and then silently turn to each other giggling or smiling, is where the interest lies.

To play with Absolut Quartet, go to absolutmachines and click the tab for absolut quartet. You’ll be given instructions as you get in the queue to play. You can also interact with Absolut Choir, a robotic singing group created by the Swedish design team Teenage Engineering.