Toyota Unveils Violin-Playing Robot

eldavojohn writes "Toyota has unveiled a robot that can play the violin. From the article: 'Toyota said it planned to further advance the robot's dexterity to enable it to use tools and assist with domestic duties and nursing and medical care. The robot has 17 joints in both of its hands and arms now.' It seems there have been small — or maybe even strange, impractical — advances in robotics repeatedly with demonstrations of robots performing a specialized task. Are we merely struggling to hard code each human activity as we strive for an all purpose android? Is there a chance artificial intelligence & robotics will ever become generalized enough to make interaction interesting?"

Comments

Very cool, but

[log1385]

Robots will never be be able to match the musical abilities of some humans. There are too many tonal subtleties involved, especially on the violin.

That is still very impressive, nonetheless.

Re:Very cool, but

[log1385]

True, but a robot ear can never be programmed to hear what a human ear hears. A robot can't really bring out the emotion in a song. (It could be very good at simulating emotion, though).

Re:Very cool, but

[CRCulver]

Who cares? When it comes to music without a programme (i.e. purely instrumental), I listen because I find its structure interesting, and the best way to hear that structure is to have someone play the score as accurately as possible. So much of the "emotion" people talk about in music (usually Classical or Romantic-era repertoire) is performers reading something into a piece that the composer never indicated in the score. Purely electronic works avoid this and are laudable for it, although the best merely human ensembles and conductors already know to avoid imposing their own prejudices on a score and can generally succeed.

Re:Very cool, but

[QuantumG]

As I write this there are 3 replies to your comment modded up but none of them seem to mention that obvious (I hope) fact that programming this robot to play the violin has absolutely nothing to do with matching the musical abilities of humans. Toyota are not demonstrating a product here. They're not saying "in stores next fall: robots that can play violins". They don't think there's a huge market for violin playing robots out there that is just waiting to be tapped.

The point of this demonstration is to show that their robot research has reached a point where they have built a robot with joints that have sufficient degrees of freedom and controllable accuracy that they can do this kind of stunt. You're supposed to look at a robot playing the violin and say "well, if it can play the violin then it can hold a power drill or other tools!"

I'd suggest that maybe they should program the robot to put together some of the crappy furniture you get from Ikea but then people will claim it wasn't cost effective to use a billion dollar robot to do the work of a home handy man or something.

Re:Very cool, but

[eh2o]

Not true; there are many "expression" marks put into the score, the interpretation of which requires the player/conductor to be familiar with appropriate idiomatic interpretations of the time period. In fact this has always existed, but hasn't always been explicitly written. e.g. baroque era pieces don't have any expressive indicators at all, but *did* have specific interpretations as they typically went with specific dances requiring particular tempos and so on.

Furthermore much of the work that a musician does involves subtle modifications to the rendition that enhance the clarity of the structure. e.g. microtiming deviations in the melody and subtle tonal inflections are a major part of what makes multiple voices traceable to your perception in polyphonic music -- with strict timing it is *much* more difficult to hear out any polyphonic structure. These effects can be measured quantitatively, by the way, but are far too complex to notate in any score intended for humans to read, and for the most part are too complex for an experience musician to be fully conscious of. (It is possible, however, to program a computer to reproduce them using machine learning).

Finally there is in fact an emotional aspect of music that is actually a consequence of some neural structure or other brain process. This is an active research topic. Likely it is a type of synaesthesia (e.g. mint flavor -> cool sensation). In other words the emotional response to music isn't just the performer "making it up", it's sort of short-circuit in the brain of the listener. Since this is basically a universal effect among humans it would be silly to think that the composer wasn't aware of it as well.

Re:Very cool, but

[timeOday]

Mod parent up! It's one thing to weld a door on a car but quite another to find a shirt in the dryer, iron it, undo all but the top botton, and hang it in the closet.

general purpose

[phantomfive]

Are we merely struggling to hard code each human activity as we strive for an all purpose android? Yes, playing the violin is a hard coded activity, but the important advance here is the new dexterity of this robot. It isn't so much an advance in artificial intelligence as it is an advance in mechanics.

Is there a chance artificial intelligence & robotics will ever become generalized enough to make interaction interesting? Absolutely. :) I'll do it myself if no one else gets to it first.

Article asks silly questions...

[Yold]

Specialized robots work better than general-purpose ones (DUH!). Creating a robot that is as capable at general tasks as a human is pointless, at least from the economic standpoint (unless you need a Terminator). Humans are cheaper than robots. Imagine the R&D and production cost involved in creating a robot as agile as the human body. Then, imagine fixing such a robot.

Robots perform special tasks better than humans. Surgery is an obvious application, as the summary pointed out. What could be more steady than a hand with hydraulic (or whatever they use) joints. If something is able to play the Violin, it very well may be able to cut you open along a very precise line, remove a cancer/organ/ while the surgeon is sitting on his butt, operating a computer. Surgery is very tiresome from what I understand (I worked in the dept. of orthopaedics in college), and I'd imagine if this is coupled with the proper software and human interface, it would work splendidly for medical purposes.

I'd think the Medical field would be the most interested in this tech. Surgeons could maybe even perform an extra surgery a day ($$$$$$$), and Hospitals usually have big moolah to spend on fancy-schmancy tech.

Re:Article asks silly questions...

[WK2]

Creating a robot that is as capable at general tasks as a human is pointless, at least from the economic standpoint (unless you need a Terminator). Humans are cheaper than robots.

They are now. Calculators used to be more expensive than hiring ten people to do the job.

Then, imagine fixing such a robot.

Since we're talking about the distant future, I imagine the thing will eventually be able to fix himself. Or be fixed by his peers.

"small" advances

[loonicks]

It seems there have been small -- or maybe even strange, impractical -- advances in robotics

Welcome to the world of research. It takes a lot of work to make small advances like this one. The point of research is to solve specific, difficult problems. I'm willing to bet there were other reasons for this project.

Re:yeah, but...

[jamesh]

A soft drink machine was invented that would complain if people kicked it or tried to tilt it. So it got kicked and tilted more than any other.

Some cars, when parked, ask people to move away if they get too close, so people deliberately get close and try and taunt it.

A new digital media format is released, with a claim to being uncrackable, so it gets cracked very quickly.

So logically, what happens when a robot gets invented that's sole claim to fame is that it won't fall over, even if kicked?

And now we find that even a robot who's sole purpose is to play the violin is going to get kicked too, just to see what happens...

I think i'll invent a line of robots who's sole purpose is to whack you over the head with a cardboard tube if you kick them or other robots over, or just generally abuse technology for your own amusement. Then i'll release version 2 which features a crowbar instead of a cardboard tube. I'll make a fortune selling them as guards for kick-overable robots, vending machines, cars, and DVD's.

Bold research on comprehensive AI has halted

[presidenteloco]

it seems, with perhaps Marvin Minsky as an exception, but we need a new guard.

Everything is understanding the nth degree of optimizing Bayesian network inference,
usually applied to a very specific toy problem.

Nothing wrong with that research. Not really knocking it.

But where is the research on how a generally intelligent system could choose what to
focus its inference-engine attention on. Where is the meta-logic about prioritization
and pruning of "trains of thought" depending on success of search and progress
and urgency of need to know compared to other concurrent topics.
Where are the systems that can posit and explore multiple incrementally variant theories
of some aspect of the world, and figure out which theory-variant is a better model of
past and present observations. Where is the system that can take in lots of different
peoples' writings or sayings about things and synthesize an ontology and figure out
whose beliefs are the most promising (truthwise) and relevant.
Where is the episodic memory?
Where is the emotion-tagging of experiences and important generalizations,
and the emotion-guided prioritized recall?
Where are the short-term memory blackboards?
Where is the "utterance" theory and theories for how to inform and motivate
other intelligent agents into execution of a cooperative plan.
Where is the AI just for the sheer wonder of trying to put several techniques all
together and see what emerges?

Re:But can it play...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can *you* play The Flight of the Bumblebee on a violin? Sure, that robot is not the best violinist of the world, but why does everyone dismiss "being better than the average person"? After all, all you need is to be better than the average person at everything to pass the Turing test.

Re:Robot's sense of time..

[UbuntuDupe]

In an attempt to prop up my own achievements (I played violin for six years), I agree :-)

But what surprised me about the video was that, while the robot's playing was messy, it appeared to make the same errors and imprecisions that new human violin players make. I don't know if I'd be able to distinguish its playing from a seven-year-old's recital if I had to judge by ear alone.

Re:Robotic vs. Human ability

[bronney]

Have you ever been to a life jazz quartet? Ever seen them screw up and 1 second later the facial expression on the other 3 that didn't screw up? Ever give the guitarist a genuine smile when he hit that high note round and sweet? And he gave the smile back? Then the next bar he stretches it even higher just to show you who's daddy? Live performances aren't about the music sometimes, but the performance. Much like watching a live hockey game. It isn't just about hockey.

Re:Robot's sense of time..

[RealGrouchy]

I don't know if I'd be able to distinguish its playing from a seven-year-old's recital if I had to judge by ear alone. The recording of the seven-year-old's recital has the kid's grandmother in the background saying "isn't that sweet?", and the kid's father grumbling that he got dragged to this thing when he could be watching the game.

- RG>