The Design of a Robotic Marimba Player -- Introducing Pitch into Robotic Musicianship

Gil Weinberg, and Scott Driscoll

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

The paper presents the theoretical background and the design scheme for a perceptual and improvisational robotic marimba player that interacts with human musicians in a visual and acoustic manner. Informed by an evaluation of a previously developed robotic percussionist, we present the extension of our work to melodic and harmonic realms with the design of a robotic player that listens to, analyzes and improvises pitch-based musical materials. After a presentation of the motivation for the project, theoretical background and related work, we present a set of research questions followed by a description of hardware and software approaches that address these questions. The paper concludes with a description of our plans to implement and embed these approaches in a robotic marimba player that will be used in workshops and concerts.

Citation

Gil Weinberg, and Scott Driscoll. 2007. The Design of a Robotic Marimba Player -- Introducing Pitch into Robotic Musicianship. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1179477

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{Weinberg2007,
 abstract = {The paper presents the theoretical background and the design scheme for a perceptual and improvisational robotic marimba player that interacts with human musicians in a visual and acoustic manner. Informed by an evaluation of a previously developed robotic percussionist, we present the extension of our work to melodic and harmonic realms with the design of a robotic player that listens to, analyzes and improvises pitch-based musical materials. After a presentation of the motivation for the project, theoretical background and related work, we present a set of research questions followed by a description of hardware and software approaches that address these questions. The paper concludes with a description of our plans to implement and embed these approaches in a robotic marimba player that will be used in workshops and concerts.},
 address = {New York City, NY, United States},
 author = {Weinberg, Gil and Driscoll, Scott},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.1179477},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 keywords = {human-machine interaction,improvisation,nime07,perceptual modeling,robotic musicianship},
 pages = {228--233},
 title = {The Design of a Robotic Marimba Player -- Introducing Pitch into Robotic Musicianship},
 url = {http://www.nime.org/proceedings/2007/nime2007_228.pdf},
 year = {2007}
}