​

Hathaani is a robotic violin player that can understand and play Carnatic music, a music form that popular in the southern part of India. The project aims to strengthen diversity in musical AI research by exploring a non-western and less studied musical genre. Hathaani explores how Robotic Musicianship can capture the nuanced and emotional "soul" of a highly qualitative musical tradition. To allow for these capabilities, a new model was trained on a large dataset of recordings of Carnatic violin players. The model was then utilized to generate gamakas and interacts with human musicians. The project promises to revolutionize productions and education of Carnatic music by providing software and hardware solutions to support gamakas, pitch-based embellishments which are at the core of this music form.