Design of Hathaani - A Robotic Violinist for Carnatic Music

Raghavasimhan Sankaranarayanan, and Gil Weinberg

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

We present a novel robotic violinist that is designed to play Carnatic music - a music system popular in the southern part of India. The robot plays the D string and uses a single finger mechanism inspired by the Chitravina - a fretless Indian lute. A fingerboard traversal system with a dynamic finger tip apparatus enables the robot to play gamakas - pitch based embellishments in-between notes, which are at the core of Carnatic music. A double roller design is used for bowing which reduces space, produces a tone that resembles the tone of a conventional violin bow, and facilitates super human playing techniques such as infinite bowing. The design also enables the user to change the bow hair tightness to help capture a variety of performing techniques in different musical styles. Objective assessments and subjective listening tests were conducted to evaluate our design, indicating that the robot can play gamakas in a realistic manner and thus, can perform Carnatic music.

Citation

Raghavasimhan Sankaranarayanan, and Gil Weinberg. 2021. Design of Hathaani - A Robotic Violinist for Carnatic Music. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.21428/92fbeb44.0ad83109

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{NIME21_70,
 abstract = {We present a novel robotic violinist that is designed to play Carnatic music - a music system popular in the southern part of India. The robot plays the D string and uses a single finger mechanism inspired by the Chitravina - a fretless Indian lute. A fingerboard traversal system with a dynamic finger tip apparatus enables the robot to play gamakas - pitch based embellishments in-between notes, which are at the core of Carnatic music. A double roller design is used for bowing which reduces space, produces a tone that resembles the tone of a conventional violin bow, and facilitates super human playing techniques such as infinite bowing. The design also enables the user to change the bow hair tightness to help capture a variety of performing techniques in different musical styles. Objective assessments and subjective listening tests were conducted to evaluate our design, indicating that the robot can play gamakas in a realistic manner and thus, can perform Carnatic music.},
 address = {Shanghai, China},
 articleno = {70},
 author = {Sankaranarayanan, Raghavasimhan and Weinberg, Gil},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.21428/92fbeb44.0ad83109},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 presentation-video = {https://youtu.be/4vNZm2Zewqs},
 title = {Design of Hathaani - A Robotic Violinist for Carnatic Music},
 url = {https://nime.pubpub.org/pub/225tmviw},
 year = {2021}
}