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The First Robotic Musician

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the jamming-with-roomba dept.

eldavojohn writes, "A new robot named Haile (pronounced hi-lee), which 'listens' to what musicians are playing and play along with them, has been developed at the [corrected] Georgia Institute of Technology. There are some videos at the GATech site. From the article: "If the musicians change the beat or rhythm, Haile is right there with them. 'With Haile there are two levels of musical knowledge... The basic level is to teach it to learn to identify music, to imitate,' Weinberg said. 'The higher level is stability of rhythm, to be able to distinguish between similar rhythms. In essence, Haile has the ability to recognize if a rhythm is more chaotic or stable, and can adjust its playing accordingly.' I don't know about the rest of Slashdot, but I can't wait for the day when I have my very own Robo Puente to play along with."

4 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. GA Tech != UGA by MustardMan · · Score: 5, Informative

    Jesus, is is that hard to get the university right? Not only is UGA not the same as GA Tech, they are bitter rivals.

  2. first? well, maaaybe by radarsat1 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Of course, musical accompaniment systems have been around since the 80's and earlier. It's been a research topic in artificial intelligence nearly since its inception!

    Robert Rowe published a book on the topic in 1992, on his Cypher system. Here's another good article on the topic by Chris Dobrian. For an open-source system, check out Bob van der Poel's MMA.

    Additionally, there's been plenty of work done on robotics for playing instruments, particularly for percussion.

    So, admittedly, this is the first time I've personally heard of a project combining the two, so I'll give it that credit for innovation. But I'd be sorta surprised if it hasn't been done previously. When you think about it... all these musical accompaniment systems react in real-time to MIDI input. Simply make a couple of motors respond to MMA's ouptut, for example, adjust timing according to latency and inertia, and you could probably have this project done in a few days.

    Not to play it down, I always love to see fun projects like this.. :) And the physical design is quite beautiful for a drum-playing robot.
    But "first".. well, give credit where it's due. I think the summary is over-reacting. (I scanned the article.. don't believe it makes any such claims.)

    1. Re:first? well, maaaybe by doom · · Score: 2, Informative
      Yes, I was just stopping in to complain about that "first" business.

      Matt Ingalls, a clarinetist/improviser/composer in the SF Bay Area, did some work with computerized accompaniment that was pretty impressive. His "Recent Works" release had some tracks where you'd swear there was a live pianist following the clairinet improvisations.

      Ah, and if you look under "Sounds" on his homepage, he has some mp3 samples up of the work I was talking about... look down for the information about "claire":
      claire is a virtual improviser program i wrote in hmsl. i have no control over claire other than through my clarinet playing [claire listens through a pitch-to-midi converter.] although claire can play any midi device, in these two examples she is playing a disklavier.

      I also know that Carl Stone was at least trying to do some work in this direction (at one performance he commented that in a recent attempt the latencies in the system made it sound like the computerized pianist was drunk... I don't know if he ever took it any further than that).

  3. Only the robotic aspect is new: check out Jamstix by friartux · · Score: 2, Informative

    For a really nifty AI drummer, see Jamstix. It is a VST plugin that listens to what you play (either audio or MIDI input), and plays drums along with you.

    It is incredible fun to play guitar with -- rock, jazz, blues stuff for me -- and the demos and songs that people have created with it are impressive. Rather than playing unlike a human, it has algorithms to mimic a human drummer's limb movements and such. The sounds and rhythms are all tweakable -- you can describe what you want, and leave the actual playing and variances to Jamstix.

    Very cool stuff IMHO, and highly recommended for any musician out there.