Marimba
Latest
Marimba-playing robot crafts its own tunes
Georgia Tech's Mason Bretan has built a robot that can not only play music, but is now learning how to compose its own tunes. Shimon is a four-armed, marimba-playing droid that draws upon its vast library of songs to help it write the music that it plays. The system was fed around 5,000 songs from composers such as Beethoven and Stefani Germanotta all the way through to acts like Miles Davis and The Beatles.
Talkcast tonight, 7pm PT/10pm ET: History edition!
All-new dial-in experience! See below -- do not call into Talkshoe, we won't be there. Be sure to set up Fuze Meeting before the show if you want to join in live. It's Sunday once again, so we come round to that long standing tradition, the TUAW talkcast! Provided our regular contributors haven't melted in the late summer heat, we'll have plenty to discuss. Aside from the movie release this week, we have some other historical news with the story of Marimba, the iPhone's default ringtone, and whatever else you'd like to discuss! Bring your news and tech support queries and join us! Reminder on new-style talkcasting: With some help from the fine folks at Fuze, we're using a new system to record the show. This should let everyone listen in live -- and, if you want, raise your hand as you would in the Talkshoe room to get unmuted and chime in. You can join the call in progress (meeting # is 20099010) at 10 pm ET from any computer via this link; if you download the Mac or Windows Fuze clients ahead of time, you'll get better audio and a slicker experience, but browser-only will work fine. Just click the phone icon to join the audio once you're in. Using an iPhone or iPad? Grab the native clients from the App Store and get busy. (Even Android users can join the party.) Still feel like using the conventional phone dial-in? Just call 775-996-3562 and enter the meeting number 20099010, then press #. While the Fuze web and native clients have a chat channel, we'd like to reserve that for host participants, requests to talk and other real-time alerts... so the full-on chat for the show will appear in this very post at 10 pm tonight. You'll need Twitter, Facebook or Chatroll credentials to participate in the chat. We'll remind everyone to check back in at that time. Your patience and forbearance with our new tech is appreciated in advance. For the time being, the podcast feed of the show will continue to originate from Talkshoe and should be there within 24-36 hours. See you tonight!
Behind the music: the backstory of Marimba 158, the iPhone text tone
In a fascinating post from Kelly Jacklin, the long time Apple software engineer details how he helped create the default text alert sound on the iPhone -- now known as the "Tri-tone" alert. The history of the the pleasant chime we've all come to know and love stretches all the way back to 1998, nearly 10 years before the iPhone ever hit store shelves. Back in 1998, Jeff Robbin, Bill Kincaid and Dave Heller began working on an MP3 player for the Mac called SoundJam MP. If the name sounds vaguely familiar, it's because Apple famously acquired SoundJam MP in 2000 and quickly repurposed it into the first version of iTunes. But in 1999, before an Apple acquisition was on the horizon, Jeff Robbin asked Jacklin if he could come up with a sound to alert a user when a CD burning session was complete. Being a hobbyist musician, Jacklin was up to the task, and he got to work experimenting with various sounds. I was looking for something "simple" that would grab the user's attention. I thought a simple sequence of notes, played with a clean-sounding instrument, would cut through the clutter of noise in a home or office. So I had two tasks: pick an instrument, and pick a sequence of notes. Simple, right? Yeah, says you; everyone's an armchair musician... I was really into the sound of marimbas and kalimbas at the time, so I thought I'd try both of those. I also went through bank (after bank) of sounds built into the SW1000XG, auditioning instrument sounds, and found three other instrument sounds that I liked: a harp, a koto (Japanese zither), and a pizzicato string sound (that's the sound a violinist makes when plucking the string, rather than bowing it). Jacklin recalls that he wanted a simple sound, which meant that many of the sounds he experimented with were just three of four notes long. For all you music buffs out there, Jacklin also mentions that he wanted the sound to have a happy vibe, so he particularly experimented with "notes from the major scale, focusing on I, III, IV, V, and VIII" octaves. If you'd like the full nitty-gritty as to how Jacklin came up with a plethora of note permutations to choose from, the full article is a must read. But suffice it to say, Jacklin ultimately settled upon a winner, a sound file he called 158-marimba.aiff. As initially intended, the sound did indeed become the default sound when a disc burning session in Soundjam MP concluded. When Apple transformed Soundjam MP into iTunes, the sound remained part of the app. Jumping ahead a few years to the iPhone's release in 2007, Jacklin was pleasantly surprised when he discovered that the sound he created many years earlier continued to live on, this time in the form of the default text alert. So imagine my surprise when the iPhone ships, and the default text message tone is... "158-marimba", now going by the clever (and not actually accurate, from a music theory perspective) name "Tri-Tone". Time goes by, and this sound becomes iconic, showing up in TV shows and movies, and becoming international short-hand for "you have a text message"... Wow! Who'd have thought? Indeed, I myself have noticed, while watching TV with friends, that when the "Tri-tone" sound happens to be played in a scene, a number of people reach for their pockets to see if they have a message. Again, Jacklin's full write-up is worth checking out. As an added and extremely interesting bonus, Jacklin's post includes an audio file comprised of sounds he experimented with that didn't quite make the cut. [Ed. note: It has come to our attention that blockquotes are not working on the mobile version of the site (m.tuaw.com) and may distort this story, particularly for those reading on the iPad via the Facebook app. We are working on a fix and apologize for the inconvenience.]
Video: robotic marimba player grooves autonomously with jazz pianist
We've seen an orchestra's worth of robotic musicians, but we've yet to see one that integrates this perfectly into a piece without any human intervention. Shimon -- a robotic marimba player created by Georgia Tech's Guy Hoffman (formerly of MIT), Gil Weinberg (the director of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology) and Roberto Aimi of Alium Labs -- recently made its stage debut by sensing the music from a piano and reacting accordingly in order to provide complementary percussion. Unlike many alternatives, there's absolutely no delay here. Instead, it analyzes the classification of chords, estimates the human's tempo and attempts to extract features from the human's melodic phrases and styles. What you're left with a robot musician that goes beyond call-and-response and actually meshes with the Earthling's playing throughout. The full performance is posted after the break, and make sure to leave a donation as you exit through the doors on the left.[Thanks, Guy!]%Gallery-51150%
Nintendo introduces Wii Music's instruments one at a time
On the Japanese Wii Music website, Nintendo has begun a series of videos called "Today's Musical Instrument," which depicts an instrument both in its for-real form and as it will appear in Wii Music. The first video features the marimba: after some introductory text, we're treated to footage of a model pretending to use the Wiimote and Nunchuk as mallets playing an invisible instrument. This is followed by Wii Music footage of the same instrument. It's a cute video and a happy little tune.Like a lot of gestural Wii games, this is going to involve some playing-along on the player's part. You could just shake the controllers wildly and achieve pretty much the same results as making instrument-appropriate motions, but that sort of defeats the purpose of having different instruments in there.%Gallery-27713%[Via Inside-Games]
