Blowfish12: Adaptive theremin keeps jamming robots in tune

Thursday, June 14, 2012

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1

Getting robots and humans to jam together is a useful exercise in artificial intelligence, because the robot has to generate notes that sound nice alongside the tune the human is playing - all in real time. But if the robot just happens to be playing the theremin, which doeshappen occasionally, humans can cause problems by invading the instrument's space - it makes the robot play out of tune.

To the rescue (phew!) comes Takeshi Mizumoto at Kyoto University in Japan. He showed a conference on applied intelligent systems in Dalian, China, this week a theremin able to cope with such incursions - as you can see in the video above. "The robot plays the correct pitch even if a guitarist comes closer to the theremin in a jam session," he says. His trick is an adaptive pitch-control algorithm that tracks the tune the robot plays and attempts to stop the pitch diverging when the human interrupts it.

Luckily, it's not just useful for keeping theremin-playing robots in tune. He says the algorithm, which currently reduces unmelodious errors by 90 per cent, will have practical uses when refined further - in allowing robots to track human faces in video footage.

Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R. Source: NewScientist