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 an 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. To create intuitively as well as inspire 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, to the U.S. Science Festival in Washington, D.C., to the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle, Washington, and Google IO in San Francisco. It also performed over video-link at conferences, such as SIGGRAPHAsia in Tokyo and the Supercomputing Conference in New Orleans.

View videos of the project here.

Publications

• Bretan, M., and Weinberg, G. “A Survey of Robotic Musicianship,” Communications of the ACM, Vol. 59 No. 5, pp. 100-109, 2016.
• Cicconet, M., Bretan, M., and Weinberg, G. (2012) "Visual cues-based anticipation for percussionist-robot interaction, " In HRI 2012, 7th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, Boston, Massachusetts
• Hoffman, G., Weinberg G., “Interactive Improvisation with a Robotic Marimba Player,” Journal Autonomous Robots, Vol. 31. Springer Press. 2011.
• Hoffman G., Weinberg G. “Gesture-based Human-Robot Jazz Improvisation,” Extended Abstract in the Proceedings of the International Conference of Machine Learning (ICML 11), Seattle, USA. 2011.
   

Press

• Marketplace Tech. Robots that play like Monk, and growth in the online job market. January 4, 2013.
• NY Magazine. The Rise of Robot Jobs. June 9, 2013
• BBC. Is the US losing its innovative edge? October 2012