Musical robots and listening machines
Nick Collins · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2007
Imagine being enraptured at the performance of a hotly tipped band, ‘The Alan Turing Five’, an epic fusion of thrash drumming, vocoded belting and virtuosic three-fingered guitar playing evoking a longing for a bygone age. Yet after the show, an ugly rumour spreads amongst the audience that even leads once-satisfied punters to demand their money back. All the personalities you observed on stage were really robot simulacra; no wonder they played so fast! Is this tale so far-fetched? The work of the great French engineer Vaucanson was introduced in chapter 1 – a modern-day version of his 1738 flute-playing automaton has been designed by researchers at Waseda University, Japan. Their Waseda Flutist Robot aims to reproduce ‘as realistically as possible, every single human organ involved in playing the flute’ (Solis et al . 2006, p. 13). Although aspects of this project formulate an acoustical enquiry, the musical applications are not forsaken: the robot has performed duets with human flautists. Indeed, this is only one of a number of such robots produced since the 1980s, and a second musical robot will be featured later in this chapter. Robotics is a boom area of the current generation, particularly in Japan, and androids (humanoid robots) are even being given soft silicone skin and affective (emotional) responses. Media coverage of the 2006 International Next-Generation Robot Fair actively portrayed such uncannily realistic simulations, including the scarily lifelike Repliee Q2 , an android interviewer.