Robots
Robotic Musicians are robots who can listen, understand, and respond to humans in a surprising and inspiring manner. Robotic Musicians utilize perceptual AI to understand music like humans do. They use generative AI to create, respond, and improvise, using algorithms and mechanical abilities that are humanly impossible. Following the motto "Listen Like a Human, Play Like a Machine," Robotic Musicians bear the promise of pushing musical outcomes and experiences to uncharted domains.
medusai is an AI driven robotic sculpture that responds to and interacts with humans through sound, touch, movement, and light. Inspired by the Greek myth of Medusa, the sculpture features seven robotic arms acting as snake hair. The arms follow human activity around the sculpture, pluck strings and respond through music and dance.
FOREST is the performative outcome of an NSF funded project aimed at enhancing trust between humans and robots through sound and gestures. As part of the award winning project, a deep learning architecture was trained to generate music-driven emotion-carrying audio to accompany robotic gestures.
The Expressive Robotic Guitarist is a robotic musician designed to play an acoustic guitar in a rich and expressive manner. The robot can play with a wide dynamic range, millisecond-level note generation, featuring a variety of playing techniques.
A robotic violin designed to understand and play Carnatic music - a music form popular in the southern part of India. The project aims to strengthen diversity and reduce bias in musical AI research by training a novel model thatch learn, generate and interact with human musicians.
Shimon is a robotic marimba player and a singer-songwriter who can listen to, understand, and generate music and lyrics. Shimon is designed to compose, improvise, accompany, collaborate with, and inspire his human counterparts. The award winning robot has performed in dozens of concerts around the world.
Shimi is a robotic musical companion that analyzes music and reacts to it through a variety of dance gestures. The technology for Shimi was licensed to a startup company and presented in venues such as the Kennedy Art Center and TechCrunch Disrupt. Shimi is currently redesigned to allow people who are deaf and hard of hearing to experience and enjoy music in a tactile and visual manner.
Haile is a perceptual and improvisatory robotic percussionist designed to support expressive collaborations with human musicians. Playing a Native American powwow drum, Haile listens, interprets, and improvises by transforming and modifying human input. Haile has been presented in museums such as the Manchester Science and Industry Museum and the London Science Museum.
