Love these instruments

and this wacky music video

A small video doco on Miewa Denki

The i-Que Robot by Toy Quest interacts in a "human-like” manner and has enormous information stored in his memory banks, he is the first of his kind to:

Teach. Every day he expresses interesting facts about history or explains new words for your vocabulary. He can help with homework by supplying information on biographies, history, and animals in a fun and informative way. I-Que can define words or do a math problems. He can also teach programming skills. You can alter his voice, make him do specific routines, even have him recite a speech you wrote.

Keep track of your schedule and needs. He learns about you and reminds you of important dates, holidays, events, birthdays, or special occasions -- even your favorite TV shows.

Entertain. His life-like personality will constantly amaze you. He can play games or challenge you with tough trivia questions on all sorts of interesting subjects. I-Que has thousands of interesting facts in his database. I-Que even asks you about your favorite sport and team and tells you little known facts about them. After a while, you will ask yourself, "what doesn't he know?".

Become personalized. With additional cartridges, I-Que can become a leading expert in many areas that are interesting to you.

I-Que is more than just a list of databases and technology. He's a companion, a mentor, and a friend. Over time, he will ask questions about your family and friends and learn your likes and needs. He will use this knowledge to better communicate with you and adjust his programming to your style -- just like a real friend would.

ServoCenter, MIDI version is a very neat solution to running a number of servo motors over MIDI

Robo Realm have an excellent list of OpenSource/Freeware vision software.

RoboRealm® is a powerful robotic vision software application for use in computer vision, image processing, and robot vision tasks. Using an easy to use point and click interface complex image analysis and robot control becomes easy!

This is a fun little robot that plays rhythms on anything it finds in it's environment Yellow Drum Machine | Let's Make Robots!

The PICAXE micro-controller seems like a cheap and relatively powerful way of implementing a lot of embedded media arts projects. The embedded web server surely has a wide range of applications for tele-performance works, and the camera based colour sensor is also fast and easy to implement.

Here you can find over 8.5GB of FREE Sound samples - OLPC – Sound Effects, Loops, Grooves, Drums, Voices and Instruments – for The Children of the World. This huge and continuously expanding collection of new and original samples have been donated to Dr. Richard Boulanger @ cSounds.com specifically to support the OLPC developers, students and XO users. They are free and will be available under a CC-BY license for downloading and use in your music and activities. Each of the 6500+ samples is 16-bit, WAV, Mono, normalized to -3dB, and provided at 3 sample rates - 44.1K, 22.5K and 16K.

All part of the One Laptop Per Child project

EMPAC Auralizations is a research project, established to drive the designed of a first-rate venue for orchestras, yet equally capable of accommodating presentations with electronically generated sound and video projection, the concert hall is configured traditionally, as a long, narrow room of wood and masonry construction. The floor is maple. The walls are cedar at the bottom and precast stone at the top and are gently convex in form, for acoustic diffusion.

The ceiling, which is the most innovative feature of the concert hall, is made of panels of fabric less than one millimeter thick, supported on a delicate web of stainless steel cables. The fabric is selected and supported to be gently reflective to high-frequency sound and increasingly transparent to mid- and low-frequency sound, providing the acoustic support needed by musicians on the platform while allowing the volume above the ceiling to contribute to the reverberance required of a first-rate orchestral hall. The fabric ceiling, which like the walls is gently convex in shape, masks the electrical and mechanical equipment accommodated above, including light fixtures, and so provides a gently glowing surface.

The Philharmonia Sound Exchange is an excellent place to find free sample of orchestral instruments