Creepy robot head reads music and sings - VIDEO

The creepy humanoid head can read a simplified music score before singing the song in a synthesised voice. This is a somewhat disconcerting experience, but its developers are happy enough with their invention to claim that a collection of these singing heads could one day form part of a robotic theatre troupe.

Chyi-Yeu Lin and colleagues at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology in Taipei created a robot that first takes a photo of the music, which is notated with numbers and words, using cameras built into the eyes. An algorithm extracts pitch, rhythm, and lyrics from that image and sends the information to a voice synthesiser.

The synthesiser matches sounds in the Mandarin language with the Roman spellings of the lyrics. Then, in a sudden burst of activity, the robot begins to sing, its mouth opening and closing with the words.

"Maybe it's one of those things that a robot can do better than ordinary people," Lin says. "It can read [the music] in 40 seconds and then close its eyes to sing." Most musicians need minutes to look over a new piece of music and still more time to memorise it. And the robot can sing songs from any culture, as long as the lyrics are written with Roman spellings, Lin says.

From a survey of 100 people stopped at random on the streets of Taipei, 50 per cent agreed that robotic singing was entertaining. About 40 per cent of the participants found the voice quality "similar to human voice", while another 40 per cent found it "not realistic, but acceptable".

These face robots may be interacting with more humans soon. The research group is making them to be heads for robotic receptionists at some large restaurants in China, Lin says.


/New Scientist/

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