Robotic Musicianship

This book discusses the principles, methodologies, and challenges of robotic musicianship through an in-depth review of the work conducted at the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology (GTCMT), where the concept was first developed. Robotic musicianship is a relatively new research field that focuses on the design and development of intelligent music-making machines. The motivation behind the field is to develop robots that not only generate music, but also collaborate with humans by listening and responding in an expressive and creative manner. This combination of human and machine creativity has the potential to surprise and inspire us to play, listen, compose, and think about music in new ways. The book provides an in-depth view of the robotic platforms designed at the GTCMT Robotic Musicianship Group, including the improvisational robotic percussionists Haile and Shimon, the personal robotic companion Shimi, and a number of wearable robots, such as the Robotic Drumming Prosthesis, The Third Drumming Arm, and the Skywalker Piano Hand. The book discusses numerous research studies based on these platforms in the context of five main principles: Listen like a Human, Play Like a Machine, Be Social, Watch and Learn, and Wear It.

What 'live music' means for one generation or culture does not necessarily mean 'live' for another. This book examines how changes in economy, culture and technology pertaining to post-digital times affect production, performance and reception of live music. Considering established examples of live music, such as music festivals, alongside practices influenced by developments in technology, including live streaming and holograms, the book examines whether new forms stand the test of 'live authenticity' for their audiences. It also speculates how live music might develop in the future, its relationship to recorded music and mediated performance and how business is conducted in the popular music industry.

This book presents comprehensive coverage of the latest advances in research into enabling machines to listen to and compose new music. It includes chapters introducing what we know about human musical intelligence and on how this knowledge can be simulated with AI. The development of interactive musical robots and emerging new approaches to AI-based musical creativity are also introduced, including brain–computer music interfaces, bio-processors and quantum computing. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology permeates the music industry, from management systems for recording studios to recommendation systems for online commercialization of music through the Internet. Yet whereas AI for online music distribution is well advanced, this book focuses on a largely unexplored application: AI for creating the actual musical content.

Artificial Intelligence and Music Ecosystem highlights the opportunities and rewards associated with the application of AI in the creative arts. Featuring an array of voices, including interviews with Jacques Attali, Holly Herndon and Scott Cohen, this book offers interdisciplinary approaches to pressing ethical and technical questions associated with AI. Considering the perspectives of developers, students and artists, as well as the wider themes of law, ethics and philosophy, Artificial Intelligence and Music Ecosystem is an essential introduction for anyone interested in the impact of AI on music, including those studying and working in the creative arts.

During the twentieth century, electronic technology enabled the explosive development of new tools for the production, performance, dissemination and conservation of music. The era of the mechanical reproduction of music has, rather ironically, opened up new perspectives, which have contributed to the revitalisation of the performer’s role and the concept of music as performance. This book examines questions related to music that cannot be set in conventional notation, reporting and reflecting on current research and creative practice primarily in live electronic music. It studies compositions for which the musical text is problematic, that is, non-existent, incomplete, insufficiently precise or transmitted in a nontraditional format. Thus, at the core of this project is an absence. The objects of study lack a reliably precise graphical representation of the work as the composer or the composer/performer conceived or imagined it. How do we compose, perform and study music that cannot be set in conventional notation? The authors of this book examine this problem from the complementary perspectives of the composer, the performer, the musical assistant, the audio engineer, the computer scientist and the musicologist.

Sound in human–robot interaction currently encompasses a wide range of approaches and methodologies not easily classified, analyzed or compared among projects. This edited book covers the state of the art in sound and robotics, aiming to gather existing approaches in a combined volume. Collecting chapters from world-leading academic and industry authors, Sound and Robotics: Speech, Non-Verbal Audio and Robotic Musicianship explores how robots can communicate through speech, non-verbal audio and music. The first set of chapters explores how robots use verbal communication, considering the possibilities of speech for human–robot interaction. The second section shifts to roles of non-verbal communication in HRI, including consequential sound, sonification and audio cues. The third and final section describes current approaches to robotic musicianship and their evaluation. This book is primarily aimed at HRI researchers, ranging from those who have never used sound to those very experienced with sound. Alongside robotic researchers, this book will present avenues for a diverse range of musicians, composers and sound designers to become introduced to the world of HRI and learn of potential creative directions in robotics.

Musical robotics is a multi- and trans-disciplinary research area involving a wide range of different domains that contribute to its development, including: computer science, multimodal interfaces and processing, artificial intelligence, electronics, robotics, mechatronics and more. A musical robot requires many different complex systems to work together; integrating musical representation, techniques, expressions, detailed analysis and controls, for both playing and listening. The development of interactive multimodal systems provides advancements which enable enhanced human-machine interaction and novel possibilities for embodied robotic platforms. This volume is focused on this highly exciting interdisciplinary field. This book consists of 14 chapters highlighting different aspects of musical activities and interactions, discussing cutting edge research related to interactive multimodal systems and their integration with robots to further enhance musical understanding, interpretation, performance, education and enjoyment. It is dichotomized into two sections: Section I focuses on understanding elements of musical performance and expression while Section II concentrates on musical robots and automated instruments. Musical Robots and Interactive Multimodal Systems provides an introduction and foundation for researchers, students and practitioners to key achievements and current research trends on interactive multimodal systems and musical robotics.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 4th International Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval Symposium, CMMR 2007, held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in August 2007 jointly with the International Computer Music Conference 2007, ICMC 2007. The 33 revised full papers presented were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the area, the papers address a broad variety of topics in computer science and engineering areas such as information retrieval, programming, human computer interaction, digital libraries, hypermedia, artificial intelligence, acoustics, signal processing, etc. CMMR 2007 has put special focus on the Sense of Sounds from the synthesis and retrieval point of view. This theme is pluridisciplinary by nature and associates the fields of sound modeling by analysis, synthesis, perception and cognition.