Robohub.org
ep.

014

podcast
 

Robot musicians with Gil Weinberg and Atsuo Takanishi


by
05 December 2008



share this:

This episode focuses on robot musicians, starting with our first guest Gil Weinberg who is the Director of Music Technology at Georgia Tech. With his wooden robot drummer Haile, he’s been evolving a new beat for the future of music. Our second guest, Atsuo Takanishi describes the Waseda Flutist, a robot that mimics human lungs, vocal chords, and lips to accurately play the flute.

Gil Weinberg

Prof. Gil Weinberg is the Director of Music Technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where his research has been bridging the musical and scientific worlds. From his PhD on, he’s been investigating the use of technology to expand musical expression, creativity, and learning and then bringing his ideas to the public with concerts, museum exhibitions and festivals. His most well know projects include the Beatbugs, electronic percussion instruments which when networked can allow newbie musicians, and even children, to collaborate and create living tunes. In another project, he’s working to create an Accessible Aquarium for the visually impaired to perceive the dynamics of life in a fish tank through auditory cues.

In this episode we concentrate on his latest compositions in music technology, Haile the robot drummer and Shimon the Marimba player.
Haile has also been touring the world, playing with human teachers and even evolving its own beats to reach robotic improvisation. Haile, is esthetically elegant with its wooden structure and can play faster than a human at a rate of 15 HZ.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DYOqSTmGDA

Finally, Weinberg gives us his view on robot-musician interactions and the possible opening of a new music genre.

Atsuo Takanishi

Prof. Atsuo Takanishi has been designing robots for decades. From robots meant to help the medical industry, such as the Oral Rehabilitation Robot or the Clinical Jaw Movement Training Robot, to bio-mimetic robots such as the Emotion Expression Humanoid Robot or the Rat Robot, Takanishi’s lab excels in designing advanced and feature-rich platforms.

Takanishi Lab’s 15-year foray into musical robots has yielded the Anthropomorphic Flutist Robot, a robot capable of playing the flute at the level of an intermediate human flutist. Now in it’s 4th version, the robot mimics many of the mechanisms used by humans to play the flute, such as 3DOF lips, a vibrato and a complex mechanical tongue capable of advanced flute techniques such as the double tonguing technique. Check out the video below:

Links:


Latest News:

Visit the Robots Forum for links and discussions about
Evolution Robotics, iRobot’s Warrior 700 and the ethics of military robotics presented in the podcast.

View and post comments on this episode in the forum



tags: ,


Podcast team The ROBOTS Podcast brings you the latest news and views in robotics through its bi-weekly interviews with leaders in the field.
Podcast team The ROBOTS Podcast brings you the latest news and views in robotics through its bi-weekly interviews with leaders in the field.





Related posts :



Researchers are teaching robots to walk on Mars from the sand of New Mexico

  02 Sep 2025
Researchers are closer to equipping a dog-like robot to conduct science on the surface of Mars

Engineering fantasy into reality

  26 Aug 2025
PhD student Erik Ballesteros is building “Doc Ock” arms for future astronauts.

RoboCup@Work League: Interview with Christoph Steup

and   22 Aug 2025
Find out more about the RoboCup League focussed on industrial production systems.

Interview with Haimin Hu: Game-theoretic integration of safety, interaction and learning for human-centered autonomy

and   21 Aug 2025
Hear from Haimin in the latest in our series featuring the 2025 AAAI / ACM SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants.

AIhub coffee corner: Agentic AI

  15 Aug 2025
The AIhub coffee corner captures the musings of AI experts over a short conversation.

Interview with Kate Candon: Leveraging explicit and implicit feedback in human-robot interactions

and   25 Jul 2025
Hear from PhD student Kate about her work on human-robot interactions.

#RoboCup2025: social media round-up part 2

  24 Jul 2025
Find out what participants got up to during the second half of RoboCup2025 in Salvador, Brazil.

#RoboCup2025: social media round-up 1

  21 Jul 2025
Find out what participants got up to during the opening days of RoboCup2025 in Salvador, Brazil.



 

Robohub is supported by:




Would you like to learn how to tell impactful stories about your robot or AI system?


scicomm
training the next generation of science communicators in robotics & AI


 












©2025.05 - Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence