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}
}