36 research outputs found

    Towards Anthropomorphic Robot Thereminist

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    Theremin is an electronic musical instrument considered to be the most difficult to play which requires the players hands to have high precision and stability as any position change within proximity of the instruments antennae can make a difference to the pitch or volume. In a different direction to previous developments of Theremin playing robots, we propose a Humanoid Thereminist System that goes beyond using only one degree of freedom which will open up the possibility for robot to acquire more complex skills, such as aerial fingering and include musical expressions in playing the Theremin. The proposed system consists of two phases, namely calibration phase and playing phase which can be executed independently. During the playing phase, the System takes input from a MIDI file and performs path planning using a combination of minimum energy strategy in joint space and feedback error correction for next playing note. Three experiments have been conducted to evaluate the developed system quantitatively and qualitatively by playing a selection of music files. The experiments have demonstrated that the proposed system can effectively utilise multiple degrees of freedoms while maintaining minimum pitch error margins

    Audience mood estimation for the Waseda Anthropomorphic Saxophonist 5 (WAS-5) using cloud cognitive services

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    In this paper, a system to recognize the emotions of the audience from facial expressions is proposed for the Waseda Anthropomorphic Saxophonist ver. 5. This system will be used to assess the mood of audience and adapt the emotional connotation of the robot musical performance. General models for emotion definition have been analyzed and Ekman’s model has been chosen. Emotion recognition is performed via cloud computing to implement scalable solutions

    Robotic Musicianship - Musical Interactions Between Humans and Machines

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    Enhancing stroke generation and expressivity in robotic drummers - A generative physics model approach

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    The goal of this master's thesis research is to enhance the stroke generation capabilities and musical expressivity in robotic drummers. The approach adopted is to understand the physics of human fingers-drumstick-drumhead interaction and try to replicate the same behavior in a robotic drumming system with the minimum number of degrees of freedom. The model that is developed is agnostic to the exact specifications of the robotic drummer that will attempt to emulate human like drum strokes, and therefore can be used in any robotic drummer that uses actuators with complete control over the motor position angle. Initial approaches based on exploiting the instability of a PID control system to generate multiple bounces and the limitations of this approach are also discussed in depth. In order to assess the success of the model and the implementation in the robotic platform a subjective evaluation was conducted. The evaluation results showed that, the observed data was statistically equivalent to the subjects resorting to a blind guess in order to distinguish between a human playing a multiple bounce stroke and a robot playing a similar kind of stroke.M.S

    Face the Music and Glance: How Nonverbal Behaviour Aids Human Robot Relationships Based in Music

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    It is our hypothesis that improvised musical interaction will be able to provide the extended engagement often failing others during long term Human Robot Interaction (HRI) trials. Our previous work found that simply framing sessions with their drumming robot Mortimer as social interactions increased both social presence and engagement, two factors we feel are crucial to developing and maintaining a positive and meaningful relationship between human and robot. For this study we investigate the inclusion of the additional social modalities, namely head pose and facial expression, as nonverbal behaviour has been shown to be an important conveyor of information in both social and musical contexts. Following a 6 week experimental study using automatic behavioural metrics, results demonstrate those subjected to nonverbal behaviours not only spent more time voluntarily with the robot, but actually increased the time they spent as the trial progressed. Further, that they interrupted the robot less during social interactions and played for longer uninterrupted. Conversely, they also looked at the robot less in both musical and social contexts. We take these results as support for open ended musical activity providing a solid grounding for human robot relationships and the improvement of this by the inclusion of appropriate nonverbal behaviours

    A robot musician interacting with a human partner through initiative exchange

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    ABSTRACT This paper proposes a novel method to realize an initiative exchange for robot. A humanoid robot plays vibraphone exchanging initiative with a human performer by perceiving multimodal cues in real time. It understands the initiative exchange cues through vision and audio information. In order to achieve the natural initiative exchange between a human and a robot in musical performance, we built the system and the software architecture and carried out the experiments for fundamental algorithms which are necessary to the initiative exchange

    Biologically-inspired robots for stage performance

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    Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 46-47).Stage performances present many challenges and opportunities in the field of robotics. Onstage robots not only have to function flawlessly, they must interact convincingly with their human counterparts and adhere to a rigid timeline. The scope of this work is to create set pieces that look and behave like organic entities for the production of Tod Machover's new opera, Death and the Powers. With a set of design rules and techniques, I have developed the mechanical and control systems, including their interactive behavior, for several performance-ready robots. A six-legged walking robot and transformable robot were first built to verify the adopted design methodology prior to the prototyping of onstage robots. In addition, the robots were certified as performance-ready according to four criteria: the visual appearance, the overall functionality, the quality of movement, and the fluency of human-robot interaction. Two robots were successfully built and tested for use in the opera of Death and the Powers.by Wei Dong.S.M

    Musicianship for Robots with Style

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    ABSTRACT In this paper we introduce a System conceived to serve as the "musical brain" of autonomous musical robots or agent-based software simulations of robotic systems. Our research goal is to provide robots with the ability to integrate with the musical culture of their surroundings. In a multi-agent configuration, the System can simulate an environment in which autonomous agents interact with each other as well as with external agents (e.g., robots, human beings or other systems). The main outcome of these interactions is the transformation and development of their musical styles as well as the musical style of the environment in which they live
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