ShoutingInDigital

Redefining the Robot Dance

Posted by James | Filed under tech

A group of musicians and scientists have teamed up to create one of the most important breakthroughs of recent times – a robot that recognises good punk music.

Recent gigs in London have seen three of the two-metre robots pogo-ing along to bands they appreciate and recognise as punk. If they hear music from another genre, they simply ignore it and sit still.

A team of scientists, computer programmers and artists worked together to teach the robots what punk is. They were played music over a period of time – punk, reggae, soul, disco and classical – to learn to differentiate between the various styles.

This means that when the robot hears a new song, within 30 seconds it can decide whether or not it is punk and react accordingly. Whilst tall sticks dancing robotically may bring up mental images of Peter Crouch’s goal celebrations, these robots merelypogo on the spot, responding in real time to music they may never have heard before. The punkier the music, the wilder the robots go. Teaching the robots to ignore bands who have sold out is presumably the next step.

Professor Peter McOwan from Queen Mary, University of London, is a computational biologist and one of the main figures behind the project.

He said: “My interest is in trying to build mathematical and computational models for the way the brain processes sensory information, such as visual or auditory information.”

“The idea is to look at the information processing strategies that have taken billions of years to develop through evolution, steal them and put them into computers.”

Giving robots taste is a fine way to personalise and tailor a machine. Giving them emotions (or at least the ability to convincingly fake them) is perhaps something that could be used in the development of robot wives. It’s quite close to the core of many science fiction tales and something that has gone wrong in so many films. Will Smith is currently said to be in hiding.

Tags: quirky