Grow Musical Robots?!?! – (AI Dev Series)

Hi All, last time, we saw the work of Mark Sagar, the CEO of Soul Machines. Talking about it, his work in or more specifically, his creations do not directly say, “Hey, I am helping humanity grow!!” He plans to look at the larger picture. “Where does humanity, as a whole, want to reach?”, is his imaginative painting and then he starts recreating it on a canvas, beginning from the corner.

However, some people like to start right from the center, eventually spreading out affecting all individuals and helping them grow. This requires much less effort, however, it does not always ensure you completing the portrait, and often, innovators find asking themselves, “How far is, actually, too far?”

Talking about “too far”, in my opinion, we are very close as well as far away from it. We are very close as we grow and evolve at an exponential speed!!! Just like it took roughly 10,000 years to get from writing to printing press but only about 500 more to get to e-mail. But, at the same time, we could feel about being very far, for human imagination still takes us to a world with robots for every job, every house chore, and every activity. A time where no matter how rich or poor, a person with knowledge and imagination adequate enough to create such functioning bots has to do nothing but sit peacefully by a window with a mug of coffee and an engrossing book…(one of my fantasies for life)

Well, getting to the part where an artist paints a haven starting from the center. Now that is indeed a very satisfying job. That is so because in the end, you do get the satisfaction of making the life of another individual liveable…and this keeps you going even when you are the only one on the path.

Gil Weinberg :

That line may have as well given you a slight hint that it is indeed the time to introduce an ingenious mind helping humanity to grow, Gil Weinberg.

Gil Weinberg, 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.

Being the founding director of Georgia Tech for Music Technology. He places quite an interesting thought saying,” A.I. is not only going to replace humans, but it is also going to enhance humans”. Currently, at Georgia Tech Center, he has completed a surprising part of the “painting”. He had helped music, as well as prosthetics, reach the next level. Talking about music, he has developed an incredible bot named Shimon a marimba-playing robot. The bot functions such that its primary algorithm is to study the music being played. Then it uses this accepted input, revising and improvising this music according to its desire. That being said, wouldn’t you agree that this indeed is the finest example of Machine Learning at its best??? (well…at least at the moment)

So, Machine Learning…
Machine learning is the ability to find patterns in data. So let’s say we feed Shimon(the name of Gil’s “marimba-playing” bot…) some song. Then it is programmed to figure out what note would be and could be played after what note. So, this could mean that Shimon could play 30% A.R. Rahman, another 30% Shankar Mahadevan, another 30% Ajay-Atul and possibly 10% me🎶! creating a type of morphing that humans could never even imagine, forget creating one…!!!

Shimon, the robotic marimba player that can listen to, understand, collaborate with, and surprise his human counterparts, all thanks to a class within machine learning called Deep Learning…

Check out the live performance of Shimon at the end of the post!!!

Image Courtesy: https://gtcmt.gatech.edu/robotic-musicianship

Epilogue :

However, this creation gave him the feeling of standing against the talent that today’s musicians bring forth. So he brought forth an idea that helped musicians to efficiently practice, generate, and regenerate legendary music.

…to know further about other such ingenious minds and their fabulous creations, Subscribe to stay in touch and also add our website to your home screen!!!

See you soon…Bye!!!

P.S.:-
All expressions in this post are copyrighted to the author Hriday Kharpude©.

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