After months of design and construction between myself & Mike Vance, we’ve designed and created a machine we never thought possible…..A robotic musician which can interact with human players. Our Intelligent Robotic Percussion system was presented at the Engineering Design Presentations at the NRC research facility this past Friday. Our system had never been operational until 9 hours before the presentation, we were a hair’s breadth away and ready to finally give up….
This Report will explore the past and current research into the areas of Beat Induction, Rhythm Recognition and percussive improvisation.First we must ask, why? In terms of current robotic systems, most focus simply on sound production (Mechanically reproducing a set of static instructions) and rarely address perceptual aspects of musicianship, such as listening, analysis, improvisation and interaction with human input. There has been some breakthrough work done on improvisation and robotic percussion in the last few years which will be explored. First we will introduce the problem of beat induction and the varying methods by which it can be achieved. We will then attempt to clearly understand how this problem will be applied to our robotic system. Furthermore we will show how we can use state-of-the-art research into similar robotic systems as a guide and stepping stone for our project.
Brit Cruise 