Shimon + ZOOZbeat

Abstract

ZOOZbeat is a gestural mobile musical controller that allows novices and musicians to improvise with Shimon, an autonomous robotic marimba player designed to create inspiring human-robot musical interactions that lead to novel musical experiences and outcomes. Shimon combines computational modeling of music perception, interaction, and improvisation with the capacity to produce melodic and harmonic acoustic responses through choreographic gestures. The robot, therefore, "listens like a human and improvises like a machine".