The next great musical composer might be a robot
Meet Shimon, a four-armed, marimba-playing robot with a love of classical and jazz music. Robots playing musical instruments is nothing new, but Shimon is beginning to compose its own melodies and improvise along with human musicians. With a database of 5,000 complete songs and two million motifs and riffs, Shimon might soon be the feature musician at a jazz club near you.
According to Juquai McDuffie for Popular Mechanics: "Mason Bretan, a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech, perfected Shimon's musical abilities after seven years, enabling him to comprehend music played by humans and extemporize over the pre-composed chord progressions.
'An artist has a bigger idea of what he or she is trying to achieve within the next few measures or later in the piece,' Bretan says in an interview. 'Shimon is now coming up with higher-level musical semantics. Rather than thinking note by note, it has a larger idea of what it wants to play as a whole.'
As long as researchers continue to feed Shimon different source material, the music-creating robot will produce a different sequence that can't be predicted by researchers. And the robot definitely has a style. A musician himself, Bretan says Shimon is a fusion of jazz and classical."
About the Author
Alexis GajewskiAlexis Gajewski
Senior Content Strategist
Alexis Gajewski is a manufacturing writer and editor with nearly 20 years of experience covering the people, practices, and technologies that keep industrial facilities running. For more than a decade, she served as Senior Content Strategist for Plant Services, creating content for plant managers, engineers, and maintenance professionals on a variety of industrial topics.
During her tenure, Alexis worked to develop the brand’s digital strategy and helped launch and produce Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast. She also created The Lighter Side of Manufacturing, a weekly blog that explored the inventive and sometimes humorous side of the industry.
Alexis co-founded Influential Women in Manufacturing, a recognition program that honored 49 women in its first two years, earned an industry award for Best Product Launch, and received a proclamation from Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and a commendation from U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth.
She also led newsroom operations and development at a large media company where she set editorial standards, developed training curriculum, and helped support AI adoption for more than 150 editors across 80+ brands spanning manufacturing, industrial processing, automation, and more.
Additionally, Alexis works as a freelance writer and editor, and her areas of interest include continuous improvement, the skilled workforce, and the role of emerging technology on the plant floor.
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