Musical robot swarms, timing, and equilibria

Abstract

This paper studies swarms of autonomous musical robots and its contributions are twofold. First, I introduce Dr. Squiggles, a simple rhythmic musical robot, which serves as a general platform for studying human-robot and robot-robot musical interaction. Secondly, I use three Dr. Squiggles robots to study what happens when musical robots listen to, learn from, and respond to one another while improvising music together. This paper has a supplementary video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN711HXPfuY which shows the three robots playing some of the equilibrium rhythms.