Emergent songs by social robots

Abstract

This paper reports the first results of an innovative approach to modelling music cognition based on the emergent behaviour of interacting autonomous systems. A group of interactive autonomous singing robots were programmed to develop a shared repertoire of songs from scratch, after a period of spontaneous creations, adjustments and memory reinforcements. The robots interact with each other by means of vocal-like sounds. They use real sounds as opposed to software simulation. They are furnished with a physical model of the vocal tract, which synthesises vocal singing-like intonations, and a listening mechanism, which extracts pitch sequences from audio signals. The robots learn to imitate each other by babbling heard intonation patterns in order to evolve vectors of motor control parameters to synthesise the imitations. Models of the basic mechanisms underlying the emergence of songs are of great interest for musicians looking for hitherto unexplored ways to create music with interactive machines.