First Robotic LEGO Band Made Its Hit

Italian music producer Giuseppe Acito may have found his job a little boring after years and years of doing musical productions for known personalities in the music industry. This time he dedicated his time to a newly-found group known as “Toa Mata Band” that just made its first hit.

The Toa Mata Band is a quartet composed of several robotic figures made from blocks of LEGO programmed to play electronic instruments. Many would think, especially those who haven’t seen the video, that the music produced by these LEGO figures was just some kind of a beat without clear dynamics. That could have been the case if the production weren’t backed by a known musical producer.

Each band memer was built from LEGO Bionicle pieces and has its own instrument to play and rhythm to follow. Acito did a great job in arranging the musical piece starting with drums. Other band members play different synthesizers and for a band that has, at least, ten members, you’ll know the music is not as simple especially when it has to follow a beat and all are required to sync with it.

Basically, the LEGO band was made possible by a circuit that was laid on a breadboard plus a microcontroller known as Arduino Uno, connected to an iPad with a MIDI sequencer app known as Nord Beat. Each figure would have to follow a beat and has its own sequence to follow for pre-programmed music beats. They could also play live performances if an engineer is there to queue each figure.