Interactive improvisation with a robotic marimba player

摘要

Shimon is a interactive robotic marimba player, developed as part of our ongoing research in Robotic Musicianship. The robot listens to a human musician and continuously adapts its improvisation and choreography, while playing simultaneously with the human. We discuss the robot’s mechanism and motion-control, which uses physics simulation and animation principles to achieve both expressivity and safety. We then present an interactive improvisation system based on the notion of physical gestures for both musical and visual expression. The system also uses anticipatory action to enable real-time improvised synchronization with the human player.