General Electric’s robot band Compressorhead played several tunes, including covers of popular tunes like “I Want to be Sedated” by the Ramones. They played for seven hours outside as part of the company’s Brilliant Machines campaign, an effort to showcase GE projects that combine big data with industrial technology in numerous market sectors, including government and health care.
Andy Goldberg, GE’s creative director, told CNN that the musical automatons embodied big changes that are coming.
“They are a rock band that’s sort of the epitome of big iron and big data that’s helping us explain the industrial Internet and really bring to the people how our big machines are transforming data to make it very useful and human,” he said.
GE’s blog touts Compressorhead as the world’s “heaviest metal group,” pun intended. The band’s three 5-foot-tall humanoid members — drummer Stickboy, bassist Bones and guitarist Fingers — have metal bodies and silicon brains.
GE claims that its suite of Brilliant Machines are made up of advanced hardware plus analytical software that offer benefits in several areas, including sophisticated gas turbines that generate power more efficiently in plants, and patient and equipment tracking software for health-care operations.
