Leonardo Barbadoro to Release Album with Record Robot Orchestra

Italian composer Leonardo Barbadoro has been making experimental electronic music for over 20 years- he may have just finished the most important record of his career. After just over 5 years of work, Barbadoro has completed an album made using the world’s largest orchestra comprised entirely of robots, Musica Automata.

A project first announced on Kickstarter back in 2018, the album has been a long time coming, but finally has a concrete release date: November 3rd. Barbadoro, a native of Florence who also makes music under the alias Koolmorf Widesen, met his €10,000 fundraising goal (made possible by 118 backers) on July 18th of 2018, just under two months after he originally began the project. Besides helping fund the recording of the album, the money was used mainly to help press and distribute physical copies of the album- the robots themselves are part of the Logos foundation of Gent, Belgium. On his reasons for using them, the composer had this to say:

“The robot music performance, due to its extreme precision, can often surpass the ability of a human performer and, therefore, introduce completely new expressive possibilities… it’s the music that leads the instruments and not the opposite; the emotional impact of the music is still there due to the versatility of the robots, which are not limited to mere artificial reproduction.”

At the moment, it’s not entirely clear whether Barbadoro will make the full album available to anyone outside of the project’s backers. You can view the page for Musica Automata by clicking here, or, to hear a snippet from the album, click here.

Image credit: Charles Hutchins (Wikimedia Commons)

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