Musical robots coordinate to sing novel tunes
November 3, 2008
At first, the two robots had two completely different musical styles. But after a few weeks of “jamming,” the robots began to synchronize their music and sing more or less in harmony.
The interesting thing about this situation is that the robots learned to coordinate with one another on their own. Their developer, Eduardo Miranda, a composer and computer scientist at the University of Plymouth in the UK, originally programmed the robots to sing random notes. Then he left them in a room by themselves for two weeks. When he returned, the robots were singing about 20 similar phrases together.
During those two weeks, the robots evolved to match each other’s short phrases. Each robot has speakers to make sounds, a microphone to “listen,” and a camera to “see” the other robot. To start, the first robot sings a sequence of six random notes. When the second robot hears the notes, it also sings six random notes. Then, the first robot compares the two sequences, and nods if the phrases are similar. When the second robot sees the nod, it remembers that note sequence. If the phrases aren’t similar, the first robot shakes its head, and the second robot forgets that sequence.
Eventually, the robots develop a repertoire of similar sounds. Miranda hopes that the singing robot collaborations might lead to the creation of novel music that humans have never composed before.
"The robots develop their own musical culture,” he said. “There are no pre-programmed musical rules." He added that the way the robots develop musical collaborations is similar to the emergence of a simplistic shared culture.
Listen to the robots here.
More information: Miranda, Eduardo Reck. “Emergent songs by social robots.”Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, Volume 20, Issue 4 December 2008 , pages 319 - 334.
via: New Scientist
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