The Marimba Robot That Composes and Plays Its Own Music

The Marimba Robot That Composes and Plays Its Own Music




At the Georgia's Institute of Technology, Shimon plays some marimba jams. Shimon is also not human, but a robot using deep learning and artificial intelligence to play music of its own creation. Being fed a variety of over 5,000 songs from Beethoven to Lady Gaga along with a library of 2 million motifs and riffs, Shimon is one of the world's first synthetic musicians.
Mason Bretan, a Ph.D. student and Georgia Tech, perfected Shimon's musical abilities after seven years, enabling him to comprehend music played by humans and extemporize over the pre-composed chord progressions.
"An artist has a bigger idea of what he or she is trying to achieve within the next few measures or later in the piece," Bretan says in an interview. "Shimon is now coming up with higher-level musical semantics. Rather than thinking note by note, it has a larger idea of what it wants to play as a whole."
As long as researchers continue to feed Shimon different source material, the music-creating robot will produce a different sequence that can't be predicted by researchers. And the robot definitely has a style. A musician himself, Bretan says Shimon is a fusion of jazz and classical.
While Bretan fine-tuned Shimon's musical brain, Gil Weinberg, Bretan's advisor as well as a director of Georgia Tech's Center for Music Technology, is Shimon's original creator. Weinberg created Shimon to explore if robots could generate music that humans would find beautiful.
Shimon is only one of many robotic creations to come out of Weinberg's lab, which have created robotic prosthesis for a drummer, a robotic third arm for drummers, and more other music-assisting robots.
If Bretan and Weinberg have anything to do with it, creating music may soon no longer be a human-exclusive talent.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

South Korea Suspends THAAD Deployment

Image
South Korea Suspends THAAD Deployment The new president of South Korea has halted the deployment of a controversial missile defense system designed to protect the country from incoming enemy missiles. The  Terminal High Altitude Air Defense system , or THAAD, was agreed to by the previous administration as a means to defend both South Korea and the U.S. troops based there from North Korean missile attack. Earlier this year South Korean President Park Geun-hye agreed to the deployment of the US-made THAAD missiles to her country. South Korea had waffled for years on the deployment, which was urged by the Pentagon, but the  breakneck pace of North Korea's missile tests —and what appeared to be an imminent nuclear test—forced the country's hand. President Park was impeached and removed from office this spring on corruption charges. The new president, Moon Jae-in, has criticized the previous administration's decision to deploy THAAD, saying it it should have b
Read more

With new Porsche Panamera, E-Hybrid means massive power

With new Porsche Panamera, E-Hybrid means massive power The 911 pace car ahead of me raced up the main straight and took the ascent up through Turn 1 of the Vancouver Island Motorsport Circuit without a flash of brakelights. Behind the wheel of the 2018 Porsche Panamera Turbo S E-Hybrid, I tried to close the distance. My car weighed a lot more but it also boasted substantially more power. The pace car's brakes went on hard before Turn 2, a strategy I emulated. The very tight corners on this tiny track gave the smaller 911 a natural advantage. To close the distance, I quickly learned that, to access the Panamera's 680 horsepower I needed to really put the pedal down, as the throttle felt modulated for smooth on-road driving. On the third of a succession of turns, I steered too tight and the Panamera's rear end began to wag. It wasn't pretty, but it wasn't devastating, either. Under Porsche's direction, I was driving with the Panamera's Porsche Stabili
Read more

Apple Says It Is Removing VPN Services From China App Store

Apple Says It Is Removing VPN Services From China App Store HIGHLIGHTS Apple Inc says it is removing virtual private network (VPN) services from its app store in China, drawing criticism from VPN service providers, who accuse the U.S. tech giant of bowing to pressure from Beijing cyber regulators. VPNs allow users to bypass China's so-called "Great Firewall" aimed at restricting access to overseas sites. In January, Beijing passed laws seeking to ban all VPNs that are not approved by state regulators. Approved VPNs must use state network infrastructure. In a statement on Sunday, an  Apple  spokeswoman confirmed it will remove apps that don't comply with the law from its China App Store, including services based outside the country. Beijing has shut down dozens of China-based providers and it has been targeting overseas services as it bids to tighten its control over the internet, especially ahead of the Communist Party congress in August. While per
Read more