Slashdot Mirror
The First Robotic Musician
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."
This is less like computer-generated music, and more like machine-learning, only through music. Seems hella awesome.
And for the record, art/music is often about context, and the artist is a big part of what makes music "good". An unknown musician doesn't ever make it into the top 20 without the help of producers, promoters, radio spots, stories, etc. This is basic marketing. The product itself rarely sells--it's the story or the artist behind it or the context or just plain mob-consumer mentality that was initially triggered by one of those things that accumulates together to make the thing popular.
if a robot made cool music, and was intelligent, neat. it might be popular, but not because it is good music... more because it was ROBOT-made music.
Otherwise, I'd be a fangirl of the engineer who made the robot... just like I'm getting all woozy thinking about the people who made this software.
Right. The problem is that nearly all other types of instruments require so much dexterity (look at the violin for instance) that we wouldn't be able to build a robot that could mechanically produce decent sound.
I think it would be much easier to create better synthesizers and just have the robots use the synths... I mean the guy says a lot of stuff about how its important that the robot is able to use audio and visual cues, but I dont think that has anything to do with actually playing the music mechanically.
Synthesizers are getting much better, and I think for some musicals they dont even bother with a pit orchestra.
It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.
Could you imagine a digital device, maybe like an iPod, that composed music on the fly, which intelligently complemented your mood? I could see this being addictive for certain people and causing them to lose touch with human music. I mean, in my reality, not yours.
Anyway... if you could write a program that simulated heroin or acid (or even just pot), it would probably write some pretty cool stuff. But it wouldn't remember to save it and would get the munchies and fall asleep for half a day... and would still be an improvement on current mainstream music, most of which is just the results of marketing formulas anyway. But, no robot could fuzz down a guitar like Jimi Hendrix, or yelp like Kurt Cobain, or offend like Frank Zappa (or name your gangster rap artist).
Here's a question: what happens when you start jamming with two of these robots, and then you stop playing? Do they just duet until you unplug one of them or what?
How does the robot analyze what's being played? Are all the musicians playing instruments hooked up to a MIDI interface? If not,it's pretty amazing that he can analyze the pure sound. It would be pretty neat to have two of these robots play together. I suppose you'd have to start things off with a few notes from one of them, but it would be interesting to hear after that.
Never saw the sun shinin' so bright Never saw things goin' so right (Cmdr. Data, Encounter at Farpoint Captain Picard and B4, ST: Nemesis)