Shimon is an improvising robotic marimba player that is designed to create meaningful and inspiring musical interactions with humans, leading to novel musical experiences and outcomes. The robot combines computational modeling of music perception, interaction, and improvisation, with the capacity to produce melodic acoustic responses in physical and visual manners. Real-time collaboration between human and computer-based players can capitalize on the combination of their unique strengths to produce new and compelling music. The project, therefore, aims to combine human creativity, emotion, and aesthetic judgment with algorithmic computational capability of computers, allowing human and artificial players to cooperate and build off each other’s ideas. Unlike computer- and speaker-based interactive music systems, an embodied anthropomorphic robot can create familiar, acoustically rich, and visual interactions with humans. The generated sound is acoustically rich due to the complexities of real life systems, whereas in computer-generated audio acoustic nuances require intricate design and are ultimately limited by the fidelity and orientation of speakers. Moreover, unlike speaker-based systems, the visual connection between sound and motion can allow humans to anticipate, coordinate and synchronize their gestures with the robot. In order to create intuitive as well as inspiring social collaboration with humans, Shimon analyzes music based on computational models of human perception and generates algorithmic responses that are unlikely to be played by humans. When collaborating with human players, Shimon can therefore facilitate a musical experience that is not possible by any other means, inspiring players to interact with it in novel expressive manners, which leads to novel musical outcomes.
Shimon has performed with human musicians in dozens of concerts and festivals from DLD in Munich Germany through the US Science Festival in Washington DC to the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle WA and Google IO in San Francisco. It also performed over video-link with conference attendees such as SIGGRAPH Asia in Tokyo and the Supercomputing Conference in New Orleans.
Videos
Selected Reviews
Just as electronic brains have excelled at chess and “Jeopardy!,” Shimon is advancing the more subtle elements of musicianship: the cues that musicians give one another.
Pierre Ruhe, “Concert Review”, Arts Critic ATL, March 17, 2011
“Shimon is a real, center stage, jazz-playing musician, ….what makes Shimon exciting is not only that it can provide new levels of entertainment and expression, but that it is reaching new heights of human-robot interaction and artificial intelligence.
Thomas Marsh “Georgia Tech’s Shimon Can Jam” Robot Magazine, January, 2011
“The good people at NPR All Things Considered asked readers, and me in particular, to comment if Shimon can jam like a jazz great, or if he has the musical ability of a soulless machine. The answer, of course, is both. This robot certainly knows its John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk well enough. We call Coltrane and Monk inimitable, but their idiosyncrasies do not transcend the laws of physics. A sufficiently precise computer program could study the salient parts of their various approaches and create models to replicate them -- in fact, one just did.
Patrick Jarenwattananon, NPRJazz Blog, December 22, 2009
“The Robotic Musicianship Group at Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology just blew our minds with some videos depicting robots playing music with real people.”
Eliot Van Birskirk, “Robots Pass Musical Turing Test” Wired, November 21, 2008
