Toyota Robot Violinist Wows At Shanghai Expo

kkleiner writes "The Shanghai World Expo got a special treat this past week in the Japanese pavilion, when Toyota's famed violin-playing robot thrilled the crowd with a rendition of the Chinese folk song Mo Li Hua (jasmine flower). The bipedal artificial violinist hasn't been seen much since its debut back in 2007. Now we have footage of the Toyota bot playing Mo Li Hua in Shanghai as well as its original rendition of Pomp and Circumstance from 2007."

The Future of Music

[Stereoface]

Now we just need robots to write hit records!

Re:Shareholders

[Pharmboy]

I'm sure Toyota's shareholders are very pleased that their investment is being squandered on stuff like this when they could be solving their safety issues that could potentially bankrupt the company and in turn the shareholders.

So they should instantly cancel all programs that they have been investing in for decades (with the costs associated with cancelling them) until they fix the brake problem? You do realize that Toyota has more than 12 employees and can do more than one thing at a time, right?

clapping to the robot

[roman_mir]

The robot was playing the violin and the crowd was clapping. The crowd was wowing and cheering, but the player did not understand or even know about this.

Question: was the robot just performing pre-programmed moves, was it really playing as if from notes and did it rely on its hearing to compensate for the sound at all?

Re:The Future of Music

[Anonymous Coward]

Really?

Yes.
 
  I'm sure you're as shocked as somebody who sits at the patent office and says that nothing else original can ever be invented. Do yourself a favour and stop being dramatic.

Re:wow

[ahankinson]

You're just demonstrating your ignorance. You do realize that even getting to this stage is a feat in engineering, right? Or that playing a musical instrument is a highly complex motor skill, and that you were just shown an artificial intelligence that can do it, right? Your metric is completely unrealistic - have you ever tried playing violin? It's not easy. The metric should be how much *better* it is than an unskilled player, rather than how much *worse* it is than a skilled player.

Expecting them to have something more polished is like saying "Meh, people went to the moon. I expected them to go to Mars."