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Jazzy Robot Shows the World How to Jam

by Amar Toor on November 30, 2009 at 09:25 AM

Jamming is a cornerstone of pure jazz, and one of the things that separates it from other musical genres. There's something uniquely human about a group of individual musicians taking a simple melody and bending it and twisting it into some conch shell of sound that, however complex, somehow works. Some robotics students in Japan, though, have developed a robot that could someday recreate such improvisational wizardry.

Students at Wasada University in Japan have created a robot capable of "jamming" with human bandmates. With the help of an algorithm that allows it to pick up on visual and audio clues from its partner and the music, the robot can pretty accurately mimic whatever notes its human counterpart might throw at it. Researchers at Waseda's Takanishi Laboratory are hoping that eventually, they'll be able to teach it to improvise, too.

As the following video shows, the aspiring Coltranes and Minguses of tomorrow shouldn't be worried just yet. The bot's still a bit slow on the response, and it's far from smooth. But it's still a pretty cool development, and if they do indeed succeed in implementing some sort of improv algorithm, it could open up whole new doors for experimental musicians. Now if they can just figure out a way to cross breed it with this.... [From: IEEE Spectrum, via PopSci]

Tags: jazz, music, robots, top

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