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."
Jesus, is is that hard to get the university right? Not only is UGA not the same as GA Tech, they are bitter rivals.
It's a percussionist, most of them are pretty robotic anyway.
Can they show up to practice drunk and/or stoned? Do their girlfriends get jealous of the other musicians' girlfriends and start drama for no reason? Do they forget spare strings at the gig and have to borrow a bass from the other band? Do they need a place to crash one night and you come to find three months later that they still haven't left?
They can't be REAL musician robots until those conditions can be fulfilled.
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.
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!
:) And the physical design is quite beautiful for a drum-playing robot.
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..
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.)
"Crazy whatr they can do now...."
Let's all welcome Haile's first post on Slashdot!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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?
So who is the RIAA going to sue? They have to sue someone. After all, that's all they do nowdays since the equalization of the vinyl records is no longer as profitable as extortion. (and because there aren't as many gold records to award as in previous years).
Any time a robot plays something, it is going to sound like something that the RIAA holds 'rights' to. So the robot is 'infringing' on 'their' copyrights. But, uh, sueing a robot is hard. They don't respond to threats. They ignore injunctions. Robots don't give a shit about human law, man, they just wanna rock'n'roll.
So are they going after the programmer?
"Your Honor, Let it be known that after 2.345 hours of playing a 130 beats per minute tempo, in the key of G#, if the human misses the beat by 0.256 seconds, the robot under inditment will consistently and 'knowingly' play the first three notes of "Free Bird". This is a willfull violation of copyright. We want $100,000,000,000.00; payable in monthly installments."
But the great thing about robots is no only can they now play music, but, with a little tweaking, they can also tear the fingers and toes off of entertainment lawyers. Accidently, of course, but AI routines can get a little unpredictable when clogged with human legal chaos. Shit happens.
Personally, when I want to play along with a machine I use a Zoom 900x series guitar effects DSP with the early 1970's Rolling Stones fed into the analog mix channel. Mix your guitar with lots of reverb, overdrive, a touch of delay, and a dollop of attitude.
When you get a robot to do what Keith Richards does, let me know.