When it comes to robot musicians, talent runs the gamut about as much as it does for humans.
From the bizarre double-armed machine that made a guest appearance in Sweden last fall when it played cello with the Malmo Symphony Orchestra to the poorly-disguised, tunic-wearing humanoid robot seen playing keytar at a festival in China, we’ve seen some incredible examples of robotic artistry recently.
Fortunately, considering a recent video of a simulation showing a humanoid robot drummer, unimaginatively named “Robot Drummer,” teaching himself how to hit the skins, the androids are unlikely to replace human musicians any time soon.
As one of Robot Drummer’s videos shows, he seems to get the idea of Linkin Park’s hit “In The End” down, but he’s not exactly hitting those notes.
Commentators on YouTube were even less kind, calling the robot’s rendition an “abomination.”
“My first band had a drummer this bad once, too,” another user wrote.
As Tech Xplore reports, this not-so-rhythmic bot is the brainchild of Asad Ali Shahid, a mechanical engineer at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Italy who, along with his colleagues, wanted to see if robots could progressively learn a creative task like playing an instrument.
“The idea for Robot Drummer actually emerged from a spontaneous conversation over coffee with my co-author, Loris Roveda,” Shahid, first author of a not-yet-peer-reviewed paper on the simulation, told Tech Xplore. “We were discussing how humanoid robots have become increasingly capable at a wide range of tasks, but rarely engage in creative and expressive domains. That raised a fascinating question: what if a humanoid robot could take on a creative role, like performing music?”
“Drumming seemed like a perfect frontier,” he continued, “as it’s rhythmic, physical, and requires rapid coordination across limbs.”
Using a simulation of Unitree’s G1 humanoid robot — the same diminutive model we saw getting into adorable boxing matches earlier this summer — Shahid and his colleagues trained a machine learning algorithm to teach Robot Drummer how to play real-life songs.
Beyond “In The End,” Robot Drummer rounds out its repertoire with such classic hits as “Roxanne” by The Police, “Lithium” by Nirvana, AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long,” and “Livin’ on a Prayer” by Bon Jovi.
As the researchers behind Robot Drummer noted in their paper, they found that the simulation not only learned how to play the songs, but did so with a rate of precision up to 90 percent.
However, having listened to some of these robotic renditions, that figure seems a bit dubious, considering that the robot is barely even on beat, let alone showing any form of rhythmic feel.
As the robot learned “human-like strategies, such as planning for upcoming strikes, executing cross-arm hits, and reassigning sticks on the fly,” Shahid and his colleagues became more and more impressed with its skills — even if, to the casual listener, they don’t sound all that great.
“In the long term, Robot Drummer could pave the way for robotic performers to accompany live bands on stage,” the researcher said, “and it provides a framework for teaching precise timing skills in domains beyond music.”
Apparently unperturbed or unaware of how Robot Drummer sounds to non-mechanical engineering ears, Shahid said that the next step is to put this project’s algorithm into “actual hardware” and teach it how to improvise.
“For example, we could enable the robot to adjust its timing on-the-fly based on musical cues,” he mused, “essentially giving it the ability to ‘feel’ and respond to music like a human drummer.”
Robot Drummer hopefully won’t be coming to a free jazz show near you, but if it does, we hope it gets better at drumming — for everybody’s sake.
More on robots: Robot Tries to Bust Dance Moves, Flames Out in Epic Disaster