Shimon
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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.
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%
