Technology is changing and shaping our culture in so many ways that it should not come as a surprise to see robots playing music. Music is a large part of all cultures. It has been with us throughout history from the good times to the bad. Whether people are gathering to celebrate or marching off to war, music has always been there. In addition, in today's younger society techno and electronic music is becoming more popular. Therefore, to add a little more technology to that mix, a couple scientists from Tokyo have built robots to play their music for them.
The scientists, Yoichiro Kawaguchi and Naofumi Yonetsuka, are from the University of Tokyo and have designed and created the robots themselves. The band consists of three different robot band members. Ashura is the drummer, and according to the scientists, he is equivalent to four people playing drums at the same time. There is also a keyboard player, Cosmo and a guitarist, Mach. Z-machines is the name of the band and just recently in Tokyo they played their first show in a club to an audience of about 100 people. The way the robots are designed gives the guitarist the equivalent of 78 fingers playing with 12 picks. If that wasn't enough, the drummer yields 21 sticks and the keyboard player shoots lasers from his eyes.
Z-machines is not the first band to come about from robots. In America, Compressorhead was introduced to the world last year. The heavy metal robots are also made up of a band with 3 members. However, rather than playing electronic dance music, the band sticks to metal and rock music such as Pantera and AC/DC. It took the robots some time to come together though. In 2007 Stickboy, the drummer, was built with 4 arms, 2 legs, and full metal head. 2 years later in 2009 Fingers, the guitar player joined featuring 78 fingers. Finally, in 2012 Bones, the bassist was created and is known as the youngest player in the band. They also like to keep up a pretty amusing website, compressorheadband.com. A video of Compressorhead below:
Robots are amazing creations, even outperforming our own musical skill. It seems that we may be able to create them to do anything we can think of. Nevertheless, their performance and “talent” is limited to what we make it. Robots lack one important thing when it comes to music. That is creativity. Only humans can create what we refer to as enjoyable music. Rhythm and beats are something we know when we hear and only we will be able to visualize and create. That is, until the singularity comes.
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