Toyota Robot Violinist Wows At Shanghai Expo

kkleiner writes "The Shanghai World Expo got a special treat this past week in the Japanese pavilion, when Toyota's famed violin-playing robot thrilled the crowd with a rendition of the Chinese folk song Mo Li Hua (jasmine flower). The bipedal artificial violinist hasn't been seen much since its debut back in 2007. Now we have footage of the Toyota bot playing Mo Li Hua in Shanghai as well as its original rendition of Pomp and Circumstance from 2007."

Comments

Robot band

[Scrameustache]

They also have one that plays the trumpet: http://www.toyota.co.jp/en/special/robot/

And backup dancers.

wow

[v1]

nicely done. I like how it sort of did that "swaying" thing that violinists do as they play, "throwing themselves into the music" so to speak. Gave it a MUCH more realistic feel.

Though with all the lip-syncing going on these days, (even at the Olympics, I have to have a slight suspicion that the performance wasn't "live" from the violin. They could have easily rigged it to not make a sound and simply play the sound out a hidden speaker on the 'bot. But that's just my pessimistic nature.

And it didn't even fall down any stairs or anything either, that was a plus.

Re:wow

[Sir_Lewk]

I'm not a musician of any kind so please excuse my ignorance, but what exactly is "soul" in this context? I've heard it mentioned numerous times, but never really defined. Does the music have no soul because it is technically accurate, or is that just a side note? Is a certain amount of carefully planned imperfection needed? Couldn't you program such imperfection into this robot?

Re:wow

[Ethanol-fueled]

Hmm. I think "soul" in a musical context means individual mannerisms and embellishments. Take for example this video of savant Glenn Gould and observe how he feels the music(skip to 2:05 for some coolness). You could view "soul" as the non-musical movements, kinda like interpretive dance.

Technically, soul is the unique personal interpretation of the sheet music. Experienced musicians who know a piece well will, for example, play a certain passage more slowly because it's implied in the sheet music, even though there is no indication to slow down. A violinist or vocalist may or may not accent arbitrary notes and end long notes with trailing vibrato. The intensity and speed of a vibrato as well as changes in speed an intensity of a single vibrato are a good indication of individual style.

Portamento is a powerful tool for puttin' a little soul into vocals. The best way to explain portamento is This - I alredy skipped it for you, so just let'er rip.

Re:wow

[Pharmboy]

"Soul" is the minor imperfections that give music character and make the same piece unique from one musician to another. As an example: One of the tricks of using digital drums and making them sound like someone is sitting at a drum set is to mess with the quantizing a bit, randomize the beats by a measure of just a few microseconds so they are in time, but not PERFECT time. You might even put in very tiny errors that don't distract from the rhythm. No real drummer is "perfect", and drums that are perfect sound fake and mechanical, even if the tones are perfectly sampled.

Same with any other instrument, but more so as you not only vary the execution of each note in a micro level, but also the dynamics (how loud, how soft a note is). Good violin playing will be more dynamic, with musician playing more aggressive in "busy" parts, and playing with a lighter touch in other places. It varies more than just the overall volume level, as playing harder and more aggressive on strings changes the entire tonal characteristics (ie: slightly more higher pitched harmonics for starters.) There was other things missing, such as no vibrato in any of the sustained notes (vibrating slightly up and down in pitch on a sustained note to give it depth).

I was a musician for most of my life, playing primarily blues guitar, and while I can *show* you easily, I'm not the best at explaining it. Hope this helps answer a very valid question.

Re:wow

[FiloEleven]

I'll be impressed when it sounds better than a mediocre high-school orchestra player. I was actually surprised at how poor of a performance it gave--the idea is neat, but I expected them to have something more polished before putting it in front of an audience.

Re:wow

[Pharmboy]

You can program a robot to make random changes, but that isn't the same. A human doesn't try to make random errors, they put "expression" into it. My explanation of it being random variations is only a technical and quantifiable outcome. A trained musician could easily tell the robot's playing versus a humans because the variations wouldn't be within the normal expression of music, and would be just random. Just as a good musician can usually pick out digital drums in a mix. No matter how much you randomize, you can get it to sound "similar", but it is always lacking. To the average ear, it is close enough that it doesn't distract and is "good enough".

Music is just more complex than people realize, but then again, what is "popular" today tends to be regurgitated ideas, overly processed, autotuned, overly compressed drivel. Put your XM radio on 74 if you want to hear real music without the processing and automatic error correction.

Re:wow

[ahankinson]

You're just demonstrating your ignorance. You do realize that even getting to this stage is a feat in engineering, right? Or that playing a musical instrument is a highly complex motor skill, and that you were just shown an artificial intelligence that can do it, right? Your metric is completely unrealistic - have you ever tried playing violin? It's not easy. The metric should be how much *better* it is than an unskilled player, rather than how much *worse* it is than a skilled player.

Expecting them to have something more polished is like saying "Meh, people went to the moon. I expected them to go to Mars."

One problem

[Pharmboy]

There was only one problem, while the Toyota robot performed quite well, they couldn't get him to stop....

But what is it? Animatronics?

[SmallFurryCreature]

That robots can do very gentle moves is already known and not really that revolutionary. We have had machines that produce complex or fragile products for a long time.

What a robot/android needs to be capable of is to do these actions on its own, in the right circumstance and adjusted to the environment.

So, can this robot be programmed to perform an X amount of moves that result in a musical performance (an animatronic) or can it be fed a piece of music and then play it on its own? Can it be told to go to room X and perform for patient Y the music that patient requests?

Animatronics have long been capable of producing very life like results, but nobody is about to suggest that Jim Henson/ILM are the future of robots/androids.

Yes, for a while these kind of performances served a purpose as it was very hard for early robotics to produce gentle movements. But we have solved the problem of the robot arm not crushing a human being, the AI element is what is lacking. We have the capacity to have a robot pick up an egg, but no robot so far can do it on its own so far.

Nice performance, but I like to know how much of it is a robot, and how much a animatronic. Anyone got the answer?

Re:Shareholders

[Pharmboy]

I'm sure Toyota's shareholders are very pleased that their investment is being squandered on stuff like this when they could be solving their safety issues that could potentially bankrupt the company and in turn the shareholders.

So they should instantly cancel all programs that they have been investing in for decades (with the costs associated with cancelling them) until they fix the brake problem? You do realize that Toyota has more than 12 employees and can do more than one thing at a time, right?

Re:Shareholders

[binarylarry]

Awww, I bet if we ask nicely they could have the robot play the world's smallest violin.

clapping to the robot

[roman_mir]

The robot was playing the violin and the crowd was clapping. The crowd was wowing and cheering, but the player did not understand or even know about this.

Question: was the robot just performing pre-programmed moves, was it really playing as if from notes and did it rely on its hearing to compensate for the sound at all?

Re:clapping to the robot

[Phroggy]

The robot was playing the violin and the crowd was clapping. The crowd was wowing and cheering, but the player did not understand or even know about this.

If I were there, I would have applauded - not for the benefit of the robot, but for its creators, who have demonstrated a remarkable achievement. Clearly, there's more work to do, but I am very impressed with what they've accomplished so far.

Question: was the robot just performing pre-programmed moves, was it really playing as if from notes and did it rely on its hearing to compensate for the sound at all?

Those are good questions.

There

[Dunbal]

There was only one small glitch during the rehearsal when they couldn't get it to stop playing.

Big deal...

[trailerparkcassanova]

Can it safely bring to a stop a runaway Lexus?

Honda light years ahead

[2phar]

That's all very impressive, but let's see a Toyota fall down the stairs

Re:Shareholders

[tibit]

Methinks big Japanese corporations are legally obligated to use a small part of their budget (say 1%?) for humanitarian purposes. Toyota may have many robotic divisions, but the one I'm familiar with is the Partner Robot Division, and there's an Assistance group there IIRC. It's what you think it is: assistance robots, to help in the care of elderly and disabled. The violin thing is just PR and probably was done by a couple guys who thought "hey, we can do *that*", and got green-lighted. It all comes from that same division.

Toyota has an annual one day employee festival at their combined ECU electronics/robotics plant -- a former site, IIRC, of a Denso plant. It's on the outskirts of Toyota-Shi. That's when they actually open the gates to the public. If you can figure out when the festival is, you can just go there and see the demo of the violin robot. The spot where they demo it used to be literally a hole in the plywood wall to their temporary robot development floor. Last year they moved the division to a big new building, and surely they give the demos there. The demo was a multi-channel motion playback preceded by running the alignment procedure. AFAICT, they did use some force-feedback controllers, but those were just that -- controllers being fed a pre-set motion reference. Not very high tech, although definitely they had very nicely done mechanicals.

Re:The Future of Music

[WiseWeasel]

You've likely never heard anything quite like the robot's latest heartwarming masterpiece, Ode To Data Integrity. Certainly a worthy follow up to classic spoken-word lounge room hit, Destroy All Humans.

Re:Land of Hope and Glory

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Humans,

We no longer require musicians, please ensure they vacate the earth within the next 24 hours.

Sincerely,

The Robots

Flight of the Bumblebee

[purduephotog]

When it can play Flight of the Bumblebee, better than Itzhak Perlman and/or Joshua Bell, then I'll take notice...

Or better still, when it can have new music 'downloaded' into it and interpreted based upon previous styles (such as baroque style)...

Re:The Future of Music

[damnfuct]

and a robot RIAA

Re:Shareholders

[Scrameustache]

Methinks big Japanese corporations are legally obligated to use a small part of their budget (say 1%?) for humanitarian purposes. Toyota may have many robotic divisions, but the one I'm familiar with is the Partner Robot Division, and there's an Assistance group there IIRC. It's what you think it is: assistance robots, to help in the care of elderly and disabled. The violin thing is just PR and probably was done by a couple guys who thought "hey, we can do *that*", and got green-lighted. It all comes from that same division.

The Japanese government has an official policy of furthering the development of humanoid robots.

Every industrial giant in japan has invested in accordance with that policy (there's tax credits IIRC), and the trend that I observe is that they all decided to concentrate on one aspect. Honda concentrated on the legs, Toyota on the hands, others are working at facial expressions, etc.

I gave a link in an earlier reply to Toyota's robot page, you can see they had a wheeled robot with nimble fingers back when honda had a walking robot with claw hands. They're competing against each other on details but cooperating on the bigger picture: Japanese domination of the humanoid robot market.