This AI-powered robot can play the marimba, the least threatening of instruments
If AI and robots are going to take our jobs, at least they can do it in the most relaxing way possible. Just like Shimon here — a four-armed marimba-playing robot designed by George Tech’s music technology center. Sure, Shimon is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to AI making music, but just listen to those jazz-fusion vibes.
Like many AI music experiments, the music Shimon is playing is generated by a method called deep learning. This essentially means mining a large amount of information (in this case, a dataset of some 5,000 songs) and looking for common patterns in the music. For example, if you have a sequence of notes F, G, A, what note will follow next? Deep learning will give you a good answer.
Shimon the robot has been...