Music playing robots

--What did you have in mind; i.e. something with "fingers" to play an actual "human" instrument?

Depends on what you want to consider a "robot." Mechanical devices that play real instruments have been around for more than a century. Most are in museums and a few are on road shows. They require a lot of maintenance.

I wonder if the lack of robot-looking muscians has more to do with this being an overall old idea, rather than it being mechanically challenging. But when people demonstrate them they do seem to get airplay, and some are modern wonders of mechanical art design.

Among the more better-known recent entries (this century) is LEMUR, which you can read about here:

These don't always look like "robots," but they are, just the same. As art I find them stunning. If I ever won the lottery this is what I'd do to pass the time.

-- Gordon

I did a kit a few years ago:

off a PC printer port now obsolete.

customers came up with a large variety of applications, and this one just happened to play a piano:

could do the same thing today with a USB port I'm sure.

Don...

I found a DVD at Fry's store. It displays the detail of robots played music in action. I double that those robotics played the music. Human recorded the music and robots displayed the action on screen.

Those are computer animated robots in that DVD.

-- Gordon

If it's the animusic stuff you are talking about, yes, it's just computer generated animations set to the music:

They have a few DVDs now. Fun stuff but the only robot is your DVD player playing its D to A convert. :)

I really wish Fry's would open up a store out here on the east coast. :)

I believe it's the Animusic DVD Fry's often has playing when you walk into the store. The other they like to play is a Blue Man Group DVD.

For the uninitiated, Animusic is an intesting approach to "animatronics" that uses MIDI and 3D animation software (Maya, Renderman, 3D Max, whatever) to automatically move characters control points. Every note produces a motion in the corresponding control point. It is essentially a virtual version of Disney's animatronics, but with the ability that a human doesn't train the movements. It comes automatically from the MIDI stream.

-- Gordon

They talk about it some on the web site and there's a few "director tracks" on the DVD (I've got the first one) where they do a voice over to talk about the making of a few pieces and that goes into a lot of interesting detail.

They wrote custom software to take the midi data and drive the objects, but an interesting part is that the motions have to start in advance of the notes they represent in many cases (a ball flies through the air before it hits the string). So it couldn't be done simply as a response to the music in real time, it has to be complied in a complex way to produce the animation and make all the motions start at the right times.

They also spend ends hours manually tweaking the animation of the objects to get the desired feel so even though the system compiles the midi data to produce the animation, they still have to spend lots of time hand coding the definitions and the dynamics of all the instruments and tweaking them to fit the music. Lighting and camera motions are then all selected and tweaked after the 3D animations were defined.

This type of animation is never done in real time anyway. It probably takes a day or two to render a complete song (depending on how many servers they have doing the rendering).

Most of the better motion predicting software for game animation works along the same lines. They have some interesting ideas, but I'm not quite sure that except for the MIDI aspect, they're doing anything the Big Guns aren't also doing. (One of the nice things about MIDI is that it also contains things like velocity parameters, so the animation software can use that as part of the animation -- a higher swing of the drum sticks, for example, for a harder drum sound).

Still, it makes for a (somewhat) interesting animation. Don't think I could actually sit and watch it for long, though. I think it's designed for the use Fry's has: it gets people attention for a few minutes, and makes them want to linger around the DVD racks!

-- Gordon

The animation approach is often called inverse kinematics. The software "knows" when a ball has to strike a sounder, for instance, and then does the movement in reverse. This generates the time code that the ball must be introduced into the scene for it to strike the note at the appropriate time. Many of the fluid and realistic movements in CG videos are generated in the same manner. Once you know where something must be, you can work the physics equations in reverse and then end up with a known starting position and moment. Robotics can also take advantage of this to a degree by predicting the end result of moving a limb and then creating a "script" for the limb to be set in motion to create the proper end result.

Cheers!

Sir Charles W. Shults III, K. B. B. Xenotech Research

321-206-1840

Hello,

here are interesting news from Toyota about partner robots:

There is one companion robot which seems to be playing the trumpet. I do not if this is genuine playing or only make beleive.

For the history enthusiasts, have a look at this site about robots of the XIX century (mostly British information):

the first automatas, as they were called, were introduced by a frenchman named Vaucanson who was at it more than a century earlier. Then, the Swiss and Germans followed, here is a link: If you like these automatas, every year, some nice ones are on display in Thionville, France, 25 km south of Luxembourg in December during the period starting with St-Nicolas (6-12) and until Christmas.

Luc

Some Georgia Tech students made a robotic guitar a while back.....

(I submitted this to hackaday.com a while ago, and the next day it appeared on slashdot. I was robbed!)

ttyl,

--buddy