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Clarinet Wins Robotic Orchestra Competition
Sasha writes "The Australian designed robotic clarinet beat out Dutch and Finnish entries this year at the robotic orchestra competition. The researchers don't expect to replace human musicians, but are instead interested in what makes the difference between playing music well and playing music poorly. There is also a video available of the performance."
I, for one, will continue to enjoy the imperfections introduced by humans when playing instruments. I find artificially generated music (I'm looking at you techno) to sound rather bland and boring. But then again different strokes fo different folks!
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Aah, but what you failed to mention is that those are not imperfections at all but rather emphasis and meaning. Why should sustained notes not change pitch, what's wrong with a little unexpected (but not unwelcome) syncopation? Nothing. That's humanity creating music.
On the other hand, having the ability to have an infinite sustained note or a perfect beat or pitch is invaluable in creating music, like techno, even if you intend on changing the beat and whatnot.
I think he was referring to drum machine type music. Stuff like FL Studio where you're tracking the song out and the entire thing is all perfectly timed using identical sounds. In other words - it's created by a person but essentially being played with machine-like precision.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Same could be said of music, art, etc... doesn't make it any less interesting or important to people. Curiosity, tinkering, and "because I can" have lead to all sorts of amazing things. Just because you don't understand the motivation doesn't mean it's not worthwhile to someone in some way.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
"Played by a robot" doesn't mean "robotic" in the sense of "the same every time". It would be perfectly possible to add e.g. normally distributed variation in hold time of a note. There could well be a psychology research grant waiting to be filed to investigate whether it's possible to generate imperfect music in such a way that even "experts" (broadsheet critics, for example) can't distinguish between the computer and a human playing the same piece.