Here is something you do not see every day. It
is a robot that plays music in relation to what human musicians
are playing.
Shimon, engineer Guy Hoffman’s robot musician, does not play
programmed music, it improvises in ensembles with human players,
communicating with a expressive head and favoring musical ideas
that are unlikely to be chosen by humans, so as to lead the
performance in genuinely novel directions.
The robot combines computational modeling of music perception,
interaction, and improvisation, with the capacity to produce
melodic acoustic responses in physical and visual manners.
Shimon has performed with human musicians in dozens of concerts
and festivals from DLD in Munich Germany, the US Science
Festival in Washington DC, the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle
WA, and Google IO in San Francisco. Georgia Tech Center for
Music Technology is Shimon’s patron.
Here is a three minute example of the pleasant outcome. LINK