Musical Robots

At Georgia Tech The Robotic Musicianship Group have developed two robots who are able to "listen" to the music that is being played by other people and they then try to "blend in" trying to match the rhythm and melody.



As Professor Gil Weinberg explains,

"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.

He continued, "Very fast, 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."

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Reflection

This is the first time I have ever seen a project like this. The "magic" behind it seems to be a algorithm, but they mention a genetic algorithm which is used to,

Genetic algorithms attempt to find solutions to problems by mimicking biological evolutionary processes, with a cycle of random mutations yielding successive generations of "solutions". Thus, they emulate reproduction and "survival of the fittest". In genetic programming, this approach is extended to algorithms, by regarding the algorithm itself as a "solution" to a problem.

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I would not want to go into what the usefulness of having a robot play a musical part, but looking at the larger scale where this particular algorithm is able to find a solution very quickly is quite interesting and being able to distinguish these melodies from different melodies.

I remember seeing another application of the last mentioned where 5 Japanese students would simultaneously shout a order at a computer and the computer was able to distinguish all of there orders.