The GamelaTron is a collaboration between LEMUR: League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots and the composer Zemi17: Taylor Kuffner

The GamelaTron is a traditional set of Indonesian gamelan instruments augmented with robotic mechanisms, creating a robotic gamelan. This enables an entire gamelan orchestra to be played and improvised on live by one player on computer.

This project, a collaboration between LEMUR and Zemi17, grew out of "ReSiDeNt," LEMUR's new artist-in-residence program. LEMUR awards residencies to three different artists, who each create new works for robots at LEMURPLEX.

Zemi17, an experimental composer, student of Indonesian music and gamelan player, was a resident in the first month of the program in January 2008. He borrowed robotic mechanisms from several of LEMUR's other instruments and repurposed them to fit on and play his collection of gamelan instruments. He then crafted a composed & improvised performance, playing the gamelan live from laptop computer.

This project was so successful and well received that LEMUR subsequently proposed a collaboration: to design robotics specifically crafted for Zemi17's gamelan and create a touring performance.

The writer / poetic Azotaes is currently working with Zemi17 in developing the story line behind the first arias written from a futuristic point of view in a society of robots of human ancestry who commissioned the work of the GamelaTron as a recreation of what robot archeologists presumed human Gamelan music was like.