In this episode, our interviewer Audrow Nash speaks to Gil Weinberg, Professor in Georgia Tech's School of Music and the founding director of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology. Weinberg leads a research lab called the Robotic Musicianship group, which focuses on developing artificial creativity and musical expression for robots and on augmented humans. Weinberg discusses several of his improvisational robots and how they work, including Shimon, a multi-armed robot marimba player, as well as his work in prosthetic devices for musicians. Below is a video that includes Shimon on marimba, Jason Barnes playing drums with a prostetic, and Prof. Gil Weinberg on bass guitar. Gil Weinberg is a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Music and the founding director of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, where he leads the Robotic Musicianship group.

Human-robot interaction is easy to do badly, and very difficult to do well. One approach that has worked well for robots from R2-D2 to Kuri is to avoid the problem of language--rather than use real words to communicate with humans, you can do pretty well (on an emotional level, at least) with a variety of bleeps and bloops. But as anyone who's watched Star Wars knows, R2-D2 really has a lot going on with the noises that it makes, and those noises were carefully designed to be both expressive and responsive. Most actual robots don't have the luxury of a professional sound team (and as much post-production editing as you need), so the question becomes how to teach a robot to make the right noises at the right times. At Georgia Tech's Center for Music Technology (GTCMT), Gil Weinberg and his students have a lot of experience with robots that make noise of various sorts, and they've used a new deep learning-based technique to teach their musical robot Shimi a basic understanding of human emotions, and how to communicate back to those humans in just the right way, using music.

"Every aspect of our lives will be transformed [by AI]", potentially "the biggest event in the history of our civilization" -Stephen Hawking We are already seeing the tremendous inroads that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made in virtually every industry. Despite AI's rapid expansion, the Artificial Intelligence technology itself is still evolving. AI points towards a future where machines not only do physical work, as they have done since the industrial revolution, but also the "thinking" work – planning, strategizing, prioritizing and making decisions. In fact, the definition of what is considered Artificial Intelligence keeps shifting. What used to be called AI even several years ago is now just widely used and familiar technology, and no longer resides under the AI umbrella.

The Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, led by Gil Weinberg, has a reputation for doing incredible musical things with robots, with a mix of creativity and technical expertise in robotics and AI. We've seen projects like a cybernetic second arm for a drummer, a cybernetic third arm (!) for a drummer, and a bunch of interesting research on ways that robots can dynamically collaborate with humans in the context of improvisational music. That last thing usually features Shimon, a four-armed expressive robotic marimba player, which can analyze music in real time and improvise along with human performers. It's an impressive thing to watch, but Shimon's talents were mostly restricted to riffing on what other human musicians were doing. Now, Shimon has leveraged deep learning to create structured and coherent and totally unique compositions of its very own.

The Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, led by Gil Weinberg, has a reputation for doing incredible musical things with robots, with a mix of creativity and technical expertise in robotics and AI. We've seen projects like a cybernetic second arm for a drummer, a cybernetic third arm (!) for a drummer, and a bunch of interesting research on ways that robots can dynamically collaborate with humans in the context of improvisational music. That last thing usually features Shimon, a four-armed expressive robotic marimba player, which can analyze music in real time and improvise along with human performers. It's an impressive thing to watch, but Shimon's talents were mostly restricted to riffing on what other human musicians were doing. Now, Shimon has leveraged deep learning to create structured and coherent and totally unique compositions of its very own.