from the If-it's-so-obvious-why-didn't-you-do-it? dept.
USC researchers built the "Musician Hand," a four-fingered tendon-driven robot that learns to play piano by ear after just two minutes of random "motor babbling" on the keys. Hearing a ~30-note melody once, it converts the audio to a spectrogram, maps sounds to the motor commands needed to reproduce them, and plays the tune back in one attempt — well enough that blind judges sometimes couldn't tell it from trained human pianists.
The work, led by Hesam Azadjou under Francisco Valero-Cuevas at USC Viterbi (published in Royal Society Interface), challenges the traditional robotics assumption that good performance requires massive data, heavy computation, and tightly controlled environments. Instead, it mimics how animals learn: perceive, guess, adapt — using minimal energy and experience.
The researchers see the same "perceptual robotics" approach enabling cheaper, faster-deployed machines that work in unpredictable real-world settings — e.g., exoskeletons that learn an individual's gait early in Parkinson's and later help restore it, or home physical-therapy robots that adapt to each patient in real time.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by krishnoid on Wednesday June 03, @03:27AM (1 child)
Well, this makes it three times that it feels like Vonnegut is speaking from beyond the grave [soylentnews.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 04, @12:30PM
Thanks for promoting it - it's a very timely story here 75 years after it was conceived/written.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday June 03, @11:04AM (4 children)
Really what this will be used for is:
1. Record exactly what the best professional pianists do.
2. Replace the best professional pianists with robots.
3. Goodbye, human professional musicians.
All the talk about medical marvels is a distraction from this.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 5, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 03, @12:02PM (3 children)
There's recent research showing that a pianist's playing style physically alters the pianos they play on, giving the piano a subtly perceptible different sound, distinct from what you get with a tuner's wrenches.
This could be used to "Gershwinize" pianos (or whatever your favorite performer's sound is) - on a very wide tangent, kind of reminds me of pre-heat cycling racing tires so you don't have to spend track time heat cycling them before racing use.
Punch roll player pianos came out 150+ years ago, there was a period where they did replace human players - not entirely - but to a significant extent. Then we got the phonograph, and radio, and digital CDs, and streaming, and we still have human performances. I think human performance of music and stage arts in general is already near maximum possible pressure from technical competition / replay of recorded performances. This will be another mechanical reproduction method, and it will have some cachet, especially when embodied in full walking/talking/facial expression emulating android costume, but I doubt it will make anywhere near the impact of the original player pianos on the overall "music scene."
I do foresee the "we don't serve their kind here" cantina scene from A New Hope coming true in real life occasionally, especially against these kinds of androids.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Wednesday June 03, @05:13PM (2 children)
Yes, the progress of musical recording technologies of all kinds has been devastating for actual musicians.
We're now at the point where the number of people who make their living solely from performing music is extremely small:
Meanwhile, the reaction to current technology is that they're trying to see if they can get away with replacing the popular music "artists" with AI bots. Basically, all they need performers for now is to look appropriate to the genre in their costumes and dance. And the main reason any new music is happening at all on a significant scale is because it's so much fun to make that lots of people will do it for free or even pay for the privilege.
And that's the environment that leads to (and this is just among some of the good musicians I know personally):
- This guy [youtube.com] quit trying to be a professional metal singer and is now a massage therapist.
- This guy [youtube.com] relied on his wife's income for much of his life, but now has managed to scrape enough together doing music therapy in hospitals to make end meet.
- This guy [youtube.com], who is good enough to have performed at the Vatican several times, also plays jazz until well after midnight every Friday and Saturday, and teaches dozens of students to make it work.
- These folks [youtube.com] rely on grant funding. Without it, they can't do what they do, despite performing all over the globe.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 03, @07:34PM
> the progress of musical recording technologies of all kinds has been devastating for actual musicians.
My wife's grandfather was a musician in San Jose (capital of Costa Rica) in the 1920s-40s, it was no better of a way to make a living then than it is today.
> We're now at the point where the number of people who make their living solely from performing music is extremely small
That's not going to change appreciably due to the existence of mechantronic musicians. Video didn't really kill the radio star, the internet did. And the radio star killed most of the live performers, replaced by juke boxes and piped in Muzak. Phonograph recordings were initially too primitive to have the devastating impact that studio recording and digital permanent "perfect" reproduction has done.
There's intrinsic value in "being there" when live performers perform, and I think we're well settled on that asymptotic baseline. In the past, having somebody make pleasant noises was also valued just for the music over the din of mundane life sounds, but loudspeakers and music libraries have made the human in that loop irrelevant and overpriced.
There's a further dichotomy between "cover songs" and "original music" - while people profess the value of "original music" (See: Melancholy Elephants for some sobering perspective there) - a big part of the value of music is the common experience, the songs that bring people together because they all know them... Look at the popularity of live Jazz for some perspective on just how much of the population values "original music" sounds - there are fans, but they aren't a majority.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 04, @12:48PM
> the main reason any new music is happening at all on a significant scale is because it's so much fun to make that lots of people will do it for free or even pay for the privilege.
While there was a bigger slice of the population "making it" on music alone in the past, it was always impossibly small and mostly poverty level compensated. We've had a couple of friends who "played in bands" on a reguar basis, some for decades, and it was always a side-thing, even the ones that did 2-3 gigs a week in the evenings. They didn't quit because it was getting harder, they quit because it was always hard and they finally reached that point where they had enough schlepping their own gear in and out of the clubs for what amounted to a meal and a couple of beers for the night's work.
In cities like Los Angeles there are up and coming performers who hold out hope of "getting discovered" for a big promoted/distributed slot with the money machines, but there are more who know that's never going to happen for them but they "do it for the love" anyway - much like the performers in other cities with no realistic delusions of a slight chance of discovery and fame. Our metro area classical orchestra are semi-volunteers, playing churches and schools and wherever more or less just to get heard - their sponsors give them enough to defray expenses of performing, on good years, and they too have volunteers who are good enough to be allowed to play, but not recognized as good enough to get sponsorship so they do it for free.
The creation software will continue to improve, continue to make it easier to capture and reproduce the nuance of human performance through enhanced MIDI and similar encoding/replay - I believe we're at the point where software can "add that human element of imperfection / variation in performance every time" if you want it to. Even in 1989, as an assignment for a digital music class, I wrote an "improvising performer" based on a PRNG selecting different MIDI note sequences and I just fed it different seed numbers until it came up with a melody line I liked...
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday June 03, @01:35PM (2 children)
Bad AI, naughty, naughty, that's exactly what it is according to the paper at this link. As often happens, AI hallucinates and in this case it gets the exact opposite. Kind of ruins the whole vibe of the story. Oh well.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsif/article/23/238/20250909/481916/Perception-in-action-a-robotic-system-that-can [royalsocietypublishing.org]
If the AI hadn't totally F'd up it would still be a moderately interesting story about playing a piano which is impressive under any circumstances including the opposite of the AI's hallucination. On the other hand its a big overengineered like a juicero juice press. Super fast low latency heavy computing neural networks and feedback loops as an output or measurement device... meh just output your piano notes in MIDI to 'timidity' general midi synth from the mid 90s.
Before mp3 was a thing, but after 8-bit computer music peaked in the 80s, there was a short window of midi file popularity. You could get hours of excellent midi files of, perhaps, classical or background music for stuff like phone on hold music in maybe 100th the storage of similar music in mp3 which itself is maybe 10th the storage of raw cd storage. midi files were kinda cool.. Once storage got cheap enough mp3 blew that all away. But we still have memories LOL.
Anyway, its a tiny bit overengineered. Just a bit LOL. Still cool and impressive they got it to work at all.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 03, @03:50PM
>meh just output your piano notes in MIDI to 'timidity' general midi synth from the mid 90s.
Yeah, was already doing that for my EE senior project in the 80s, but... even with the MIDI codes for aftertouch, pitchbend, tremolo, etc. there's infinitely more (human relatable) expressive capacity in a physical finger striking a physical key that actuates a physical felt hammer on physical strings. How fast, how hard, how long is it held, how it is released? (what's the compressibility of the fingertip flesh between bone and key?) Synthesizers dazzle with infinite variety of ear-candy, but the inputs to synthesizers are actually quite numb as compared to fingers on keys, or especially fingers on strings as in guitars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R77D8FaTIXY [youtube.com] (note, the example in the video is primitive and would be much improved with tendon actuated mechanical fingers as in OP article's example, after the fingers have trained up in various techniques...)
Playing around with midi composition, sequencers, etc. what I find is: even with my very limited musical knowledge, almost absent practice/training, and bottom-tier playing skill, it is 100x faster and easier to just play a melody idea into a keyboard than it is to express it into composition software. Once you have played it, capture and edit software can help you clean it up to better align with your idea of what it should sound like, but getting from blank page to that initial capture of the musical idea in a form that others can hear happens "naturally" through instruments in a way that notes on a page just don't capture - even when the instrument is a numb midi front end for a synthesizer - but when the instrument is something with dozens+ of human generations of development, the human expressiveness that goes into playing on the instrument isn't captured accurately in common digital notation.
But - with sufficiently adept mechanical fingers, I bet the robots can (eventually, with enough training) get closer than ever before to capturing the nuance that notes on paper, or notated guitar tabs, or MIDI codes miss...
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 03, @03:57PM
Oh, and about the AI summary getting the description wrong, or misleading - yeah, that's why you should go back to the source material and see for yourself if you're interested.
I'll bet that AI summaries are more accurate (these days) than most slop net-journalists were 5 years ago, and the same caveat applied then.
Hell, back in 1999 I was interviewed by a dead-trees rag writer wherein I said: "our tech has been used on astronauts on the ISS" - which got printed as "Joe says (this tech) is going to the Moon!" no mention of the ISS or anything else factual or accurate they were told.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]