Now it's the "I went to Texas Blog." Or just, further glass music blog, how's that. It's been interesting timing with "automatic" glass music, right around the time I did a tuning project for this:
http://www.absolut.com/absolutmachines

(they seem to have cut their hours a bit... opens between 9:00 and 11:00 EST...... but you yes you can program the robotic glasses on the site. You also program, with the keyboard applet, balls shot out of little cannons onto marimba bars plus a cool percussion kit)

I got an email from Orange Texas, from a guy who had built an automated glass instrument (human still required). And it happens I was scheduled to play in Beaumont this February, just a few exits west -- So, I had a neat short weekend visit with John Payne, seeing what he made.

Each cup is mounted to a rotating base:


He's got a little over two octaves, I think, and on the other side of the board, the threaded shaft you see above connects to a pully, and there's one for each glass, and all the pulleys are turned by weed wacker wire powered by a windshield wiper motor.

John and his instrument below, followed by a short movie. Gosh I wish Google would let you upload sound clips! I tried to fool it with a WMA instead of a video, but it didn't take. We jammed a good bit, and got a nice version going of "Over the Waterfall," what sounds to me like a very pretty upbeat fiddle tune that took on some mysterious and darker coloring played slowly as a glass duet, it was recorded. Anyway:

Hadn't heard of these, what you see below. It seems if you have a lawn in southeastern Texas, fairly close to the gulf...... it'll have what John calls "dirt divers." Little Crawfish that build these pretty cool looking dwellings:

Ah, sweet mucky progress...