A three-armed robot designed to imitate a human conductor made its debut this weekend in Dresden, Germany, where it was able to perform with music composed especially for it.
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With its wands resembling lightsabers and its articulated arms evoking the armor of Stormtroopersthe robot that performed this weekend with the Dresden Symphony Orchestra seemed straight out of the Star Wars universe. We might therefore have expected him to cover the famous music of John Williams. It was ultimately a work by German composer and pianist Andreas Gundlach, “Semiconductor’s Masterpiece”, that he performed.
MAiRA Pro S – that’s its name -, which had been trained to recognize beat time and indicate dynamics, conducted musicians, very human ones, during two performances. The robot used its three arms to separately guide the three parts of the orchestra, which would not have been possible with a single human conductor.
Speaking at Sunday’s performance, Andreas Gundlach said the idea for the robot was inspired by scientists at the Technical University of Dresden who are developing ” “cobots”, collaborative robots which are not intended to replace human beings, but to work with them “. It then took two years to develop and train the robot conductor in collaboration with the university.
According to the composer, the process necessary to teach the machine the movements to conduct an orchestra ” made me understand in a completely new way how wonderful a creation human beings are “. He spoke of the patient work that had to be done to instill in the machine “ aesthetic arm movements that can be well captured by the orchestra “.
Two of the robot’s arms also guided the musicians in the premiere of Wieland Reissmann’s “#kreuzknoten,” another piece involving instruments played simultaneously at different tempos.
MAiRA Pro S is not the first robot to conduct an orchestra. In 2017, YuMi, developed in Switzerland, conducted the Lucca Philharmonic Orchestra in Italy. But he only had two arms.
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