Looks like there’s now a little less competition in the robot musician scene – Toyota’s “DJ Robot” (who, despite its name, prefers spitting mad lyrics to grappling with the wheels of steel) has turned its back on the music business for a new career as a receptionist. Give it five years, though, and I’m sure there’ll be a cash-in come-back tour. Musicians can never resist a fast buck.
Tag Archives: music
Sing to search
Ah, dammit … there’s a song on my hard-drive that I really want to listen to, but I can’t remember what it’s called or who it’s by. It’d be so much easier if I could just sing a few bars and have a program search the tune out for me.
Robot rock and roll
I love my rock music, and I love robots, and I’ve been heard to remark once or twice that the two spheres of interest simply don’t converge often enough. I need never do so again, however, for thanks to Wired I have now discovered Captured! By Robots – a band that consists of one human guy in a gimp mask and a stage-full of freaky foul-mouthed automatons. Be warned – the video clips beyond the link feature synthesized swear-words and the sort of music that doesn’t make it onto daytime radio. Amen to that.
Your five-year internet fast starts now, courtesy of Elton John
Fear not, folks – Elton John is here to save us from the impending degradation of culture! Because, you see, the reason there’s so much rubbish music and art about these days is because we all spend too much time on the internet. It’s a relief to know he’s worked out why his own contributions to global culture have been so unilaterally appalling over the last decade or so … though I can think of numerous artist and musician acquaintances whose work has been enhanced or expanded for the better by their use of the internet, be it for networking or acquiring new tools or ideas. Clay Shirky agrees, too – destroying limits liberates creativity, as opposed to stifling it. But it also destroys the culture that went before it … which is probably what has Sir Elton so worried.
Robots play drums and perform heart ops
Pretty soon we won’t have to do anything for ourselves. Well, OK, that’s an exaggeration, but the list of tasks that robots can now perform as well as a human grows longer by the week. At the more mundane end of the scale (except in cultural terms, perhaps) Yaskawa Electric have fixed up one of their Motoman industrial robots to play taiko drums at a Japanese festival. Arguably more beneficial to the well-being of our species is the Sensei robotic arm at London’s St Mary’s Hospital, which is performing joystick-controlled heart surgery – with developers confident that a fully automated version is not far off.