The next star hitting the Billboard charts might not be who or what you expect. It might just be an AI-powered robot.
According to WIRED, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology created a marimba-playing robot with four arms and eight sticks with the ability to write and play its own composition through artificial intelligence.
This music loving robot is named Shimon. To make Shimon come to life, researchers created a database of 5,000 completed songs that cross various music genres from Beethoven to Miles Davis to Lady Gaga. This database of music allows Shimon to process more than 2 million motifs, riffs and licks of music.
Shimon uses computer vision through a camera on its head to detect melodic, harmonic and rhythmic patterns that appear in all songs and genres in a dataset. This gives the robot more of a structural understanding of music composition. Using that information and four musical measures, Shimon can take what he’s learned and play his own personal music without the help of a human being.
What Shimon is able to create is music that crosses genres. However, researchers say Shimon’s music mainly sounds like a cross between jazz and classical music. At the moment, Shimon can play two 30 second pieces of original music, but researchers hope this technology could lead to longer musical pieces like a symphony or a concept album created by AI.
To learn more about Shimon, and to listen to some of his music, check out the original article by WIRED.
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