Here’s a short demo of Pat Metheny’s Orchestrion – a collection of music robots that will be accompanying him on his upcoming tour.

Here’s what Metheny has to say about his Orchestrion project:

I have been very lucky over the years to have many opportunities to explore a wide range of ideas as a musician. The quest to find new ways of thinking about things and the process of trying to come up with a personal perspective on music has been a major priority along the way, almost from the very beginning.

The Orchestrion Project is a leap into new territory. This project represents a recently developed conceptual direction for me that involves the merging of an idea from the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries with the technologies of today to create an open-ended platform for musical invention and performance.

“Orchestrionics” is the term that I am using to describe a new performance method to present music alone onstage using acoustic and acoustoelectric musical instruments that are mechanically controlled using the power of modern technology.

As a little kid, every few summers we would go visit my grandparents in Manitowoc, Wisconsin—my mom’s hometown. My grandfather (Delmar Bjorn Hansen) was a great musician, a brilliant trumpet player and singer whose love for great harmony was a strong early influence. Upon arrival at their family house, I would make a beeline to the basement, where one of the most fascinating objects I ever saw was kept: a 50-plus-year-old player piano, complete with boxes of piano rolls of all kinds of music. I would spend hours there with my cousins trying each roll, pumping until we were worn out by the pedals. The idea of an instrument like this, capable of playing just about anything mechanically, was totally mind-blowing to me. It was something utterly charming; on one hand it was old-fashioned but, at the same time, it was almost like science fiction.Throughout the years, that early fascination has grown and I have studied the tradition of these kinds of instruments including the Orchestrions of the early 20th century that took this idea further. Using various other orchestral instruments mechanically tethered to the piano/piano roll mechanism to develop ensemble sounds, a miniature orchestra was possible.

But, considering the repertoire that was usually called upon when these instruments were played (Conlon Nancarrow and George Antheil’s work was largely sadly absent from the world in which I grew up, or at least from my grandfather’s basement), I would often find myself asking over the years, “What might happen if the potentials of these instruments were looked at now—particularly informed by the harmonic and melodic advances in jazz of the past 70 or 80 years? Could I form some kind of personal statement using instruments like these?”

Related to this interest was my total immersion in the general modern musical instrument technology (and later computers), which has been a major part of my life since I started playing music. (I often joke that my first musical act with an electric guitar was to “plug it in”—knobs and wires are the same to me as mouthpieces, bows, reeds and drumsticks are to other musicians.)

Parallel to the information revolution that has affected all of our lives, we have lived through a revolution in music technology that is almost overwhelming. Yet, at the same time, as much as I have been enthusiastic about the orchestrational potentials of synths and electric instruments in general, and even as those instruments have improved enormously and continue to develop, the whole idea of jamming a whole bunch of combined sounds into a single set of stereo speakers has never been as satisfying to me as a single instrument into a single discrete amplification system (electric guitar) or especially, the power of acoustic instruments and sound.

The energy of sounds mixing acoustically in the air is something that cannot be compared with anything else.

See his full statement on the project at PatMetheny.com.