The Pied Piper of musical robots has led his mechanical children to Pittsburgh.

Eric Singer spent the past 10 years running the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots in Brooklyn, attracting high-tech collaborators, including They Might Be Giants, while making musical instruments out of plastic fish, flamethrowers and toy slime in his spare time.

Now his workshop is a Squirrel Hill basement, where Singer's latest GuitarBot is under construction. Two other computer-driven guitars are currently on a world tour with Pat Metheny, alongside a software-run marimba, vibraphone, orchestra bells and other percussion instruments -- 40 in all -- that Singer mechanized for the jazz guitarist's latest album.

The 1988 Carnegie Mellon University grad moved his wife, young daughter and in-laws here in August, and he has hooked up with local roboticists and musicians.

"If there's a brain drain going on it's in the direction of Pittsburgh right now, and I like that a lot," he says.

LEMUR's work has already been featured here at First Night and the Children's Museum.

Following CMU and a "not very interesting IT job," Singer decided to work on his saxophone playing at Berklee College of Music. "It didn't take me long to sniff out the music technology department. I kept playing the sax, but I never looked back."

By 2007, LEMUR's work had attracted the attention of Metheny, who was intent on composing for a new kind of one-man band. Singer developed the instruments and joined him for rehearsals in a rented Brooklyn church in 2008. The "Orchestrion" album -- named for a 19th-century mechanical orchestra akin to a player piano -- was released last month.

"I know Pat has had a lot of people from his past bands come in to see what he's doing and think it's pretty cool. In fact, [vibraphonist] Gary Burton and [drummer] Jack DeJohnette have contributed instruments to the project" -- instruments Singer mechanized for Metheny to control.

Computer MIDI technology and solenoids -- a piston-like mechanism that allows a clothes washer to switch cycles, for instance -- do the rest.

The GuitarBot looks more like four short metal skis mounted next to each other than a musical instrument. Each silver plank holds a steel guitar string, with a sliding bridge to control the pitch moving like a guitarist's fingers up and down the neck. A wheel with four picks rotates to pluck each string near the bottom, while a damper stops the sound. Software allows the player to control everything from a note's length to its "rubberiness," in Singer's words. The whole thing is mounted on a short metal stalk that lets the instrument vibrate and sway.

The partly completed version in Singer's basement is secured to the floor with a huge anvil.

"It doesn't look like a guitar and it doesn't look like a robot," Singer notes. "And it plays entirely differently than what you'd think of an animatronic robot picking up an off-the-shelf guitar. I've always tried to stay away from that Chuck E. Cheese esthetic of a teddy bear playing the banjo."

In fact, for all the robotics involved, it sounds like an acoustic instrument played live. It has the opposite musical effect of a synthesizer or sample.

The GuitarBot can be programmed to respond to a human musician on another instrument, allowing for a kind of dual improvisation. Or, as Metheny used it on the "Orchestrion" CD, it can double a musician note for note or play its own part live as a member of a large band controlled by a single person.

Similarly, Singer rigged the percussion instruments with multiple sticks and mallets so that they can be played in ways only an eight-armed drummer or 25-armed marimba player could handle.

"I've seen [Metheny] sit there and jam on the guitar, and the marimba follows along in nearly perfect sync," Singer says. "It's close enough that it seems virtually simultaneous."

Leaning on his bandsaw, surrounded by metal shavings and computer boards, Singer muses about his next frontier: robotic woodwinds.

"There's a wow factor to the musical robots," Singer says, "but they stand on their own musically, and that's always been of utmost importance to me. Because if they don't sound good, then what's the point?"

Critics Andrew Druckenbrod and Scott Mervis talk about music on "The Beat," available exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.