This robot plays the marimba and writes and sings its own songs

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/03/20/this-robot-plays-the-marimba-a.html

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With some programming and practice, maybe one day it will compose something better than this:

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Since we did not have singing voice synthesis expertise in our Robotic Musicianship group at Georgia Tech, we looked to collaborate with other groups. The Music Technology Group at Pompeu Fabra University developed a remarkable deep learning-based singing voice synthesizer and was excited to collaborate.

Oh hey those are the folks who developed the tech behind Vocaloid with Yamaha. It feels odd that PFU are developing a machine learning singing synth because Yamaha has no interest in that tech even though it’s expected that machine learning synths like Neutrino, Synthesizer V, the updated CeVIO engine and the synth being developed by Hatsune Miku’s parent company Crypton Future Media are expected to demolish the mildly updated Vocaloid engine.

Shimon’s musical knowledge is drawn from training on huge datasets of lyrics, around 20,000 prog rock songs and another 20,000 jazz songs. With this level of data Shimon is able to draw on far more sources of inspiration than than a human would ever be able to.

I really don’t think that follows…do these 40,000 songs really use that many words we can’t imagine? Or invent on our own?

And we didn’t see any examples of the robot’s great neural net inspired lyrics.

Sounds like Radiohead?!

How about less people talking and more Shimon singing+playing? Ugh, waste of time to watch that.

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I can name a few popular artists that need one of these.

Bang, Boom…

Well… that wasn’t about corona-virus.

I can’t go for that Dave.
No. No. No can do.
Ican’tgoforthatcan’tgoforthatcan’tgoforthatcan’tgoforthatcan’tgoforthatcantgoforthatcan’tgoforthatcan’tgo

Call me when it can top this.

Ah. New Wave Music. Definitely had its ups and downs.

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Some singing at 1:35

And the first single; very Zappaesque:

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