Shimon: Deep Learning for Music

June 13, 2017, from ACM-Technews. More info

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) have developed Shimon, a marimba-playing robot with four arms and eight sticks that can write and play its own compositions in a lab. The researchers fed the robot nearly 5,000 complete songs and more than 2 million motifs, riffs, and pieces of music. The researchers gave the robot the first four measures to use as a starting point, which was the only human involvement in either the composition or the performance of the music. "Once Shimon learns the four measures we provide, it creates its own sequence of concepts and composes its own piece," says Georgia Tech Ph.D. student Mason Bretan. He notes this is the first time a robot has used deep learning to create music. "Shimon is now coming up with higher-level musical semantics," Bretan says. "Rather than thinking note by note, it has a larger idea of what it wants to play as a whole.

Shimon is not the firset robot to play music. See our notice about music . But it is the first to be presented as using deep learning.