Robots Join Human Jam Session
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Tuesday, 25 of November , 2008 at 3:11 am
When we posted about the robot flutist a few weeks ago, we mentioned that it was capable of playing along with humans. What it isn’t capable of is playing in an unstructured setting where it would be forced to display a (constrained) sort of creativity. Gil Weinberg’s lab at the Georgia Tech Center for Music Tech has been able to develop a pair of robots able to jam along with humans playing different instruments.
Haile, the perceptual robotic drummer detects the beat played by a human darbuka player and improvises based the human’s input. Shimon, the robotic marimba player, joins the session, detecting the beat and improvising based on the analyzed scale played by as human piano player.
“The processing allows [the robots] to analyze and improvise,” said Weinberg via telephone. “In one of the applications, we use a genetic algorithm… You have a population of something, and then you do mutations to all of these little things — in my case it’s musical motifs — mutations and cross-breeding between the musical genes, in our case, and then you have a new population that better fits to the environment.
…It runs [about] 50 generations of mutations that are cross-bred between the genes and tests whether this is similar to a motif that the saxophone player played, for example. And it plays something back that is a combination of musical genes of what the saxophone player played, what the piano player played — something that is unique that only can be the product of genetic algorithm.”
Their improv skills are, of course, no match for the Little Yellow Drum Machine, but not at all bad, I’d say, especially considering they have to contend with puny human musicians. One more jam session, after the jump.
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Category: Musical
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