Robot Band Hits the Show
(Yang with his Robot Band)
Music agencies will be glad to have a band which completely obey all orders and charge low.
Yang Hongzhang, a junior at University of Science & Techonology, Bejing (USTB), presents the robot band as project leader in the High-tech expo on May 27th. This robot band is the third phase achievement of a project, which is launched by USTB and has been classed as research project of national level.
This peculiar robot band consists of four music instruments— an Electronic Keyboard, a trap drum, a Bottle Gourd Silk and a guitar, accompanied by a programmed control system, but without a real bandsman. Musical notation is first compiled into a series of codes, transfer signals through SCM (Single Chip Microcomputer) to control the frequency, duration and location of robot arms’ activities, those robot arms beat rhythm at instruments, sounds like someone is “playing” music.
This robot band project initiated in 2007, one year as a research cycle, and now has gone into the fourth period of research. “We’re designing a program which could transfer MIDI into codes automatically, thus we could save time on the coding step.” Yang said, “We set a goal in the beginning of the 3rd phase that add a guitar and make them play a whole song successfully, now we had achieved it. In the 4th phase, we plan to made them more humanoid, maybe they’ll have ten fingers and their movements will be more smoothly.”
Yang is proud of his robot band, “There was a similar robot band in Japan, more attractive in appearance but we could beat them with more perfect function. ”
When talk about the future of robot band, Yang thought that a robot band could play music accurately, but without emotions. “They will never replace a great musician, but could be a good Assisted Instruction in music instruction and study.” It’s estimated that the fourth generation humanoid robot band will be show off in next year’s high tech expo.
(Zhang Hui)
来源:今日北京 2010-6-1
