BBC reports on robots that have learned to appre­ci­ate punk music. I like this story because it com­bines two of my favorite sub­jects. As far as build­ing robots that eval­u­ate music goes it’s an inter­est­ing rever­sal on the usual endeavor to have machines per­form or write music. In the sci-fi vision of the future could there be a robot audi­ence to a robot band? I can only see this as fur­ther­ing the abil­ity of com­put­ers to gen­er­ate songs. If they have an abil­ity to judge the musi­cal­ity of a piece then by using genetic pro­gram­ming algo­rithms or even using a Monte Carlo approach there ceases to be a need for human inter­fer­ence guid­ing the process.

The robots can decide whether a song is punk or not within 30 seconds.

“It depends on the form at the begin­ning of the song. It flicks between think­ing a song is punk and not punk at the start and then becomes con­vinced,” said Mr Jones Morris.

Pro­fes­sor McOwan added: “If you look at the audio cor­tex in the brain and the cochlea in the ear you find that’s exactly how the human sys­tem does it.

The robot reacts to the level of “punk” in the song.

The more punk it believes the song is, the more it pogos in a “happy and fren­zied way”, said Pro­fes­sor McOwan.

Read more .…

Tags: Creativity, Fun, Music Software, Music Technology, Robots

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 5th, 2008 at 7:02 am and is filed under Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.