Marimba-playing robot uses deep-learning AI to compose and perform its own music

Why it matters to you

While the idea of a music-generating bot might sound of interest only to people studying music, the bigger questions it raises about computational creativity are only going to get more important as time goes on.

When the inevitable robot invasion happens, we now know what the accompanying soundtrack will be — and we have to admit that it’s way less epic than the Terminator 2: Judgment Day theme. Unless you’re a massive fan of the marimba, that is!

That assertion is based on research coming out of the Georgia Institute of Technology, where engineers have developed a marimba-playing robot with four arms and eight sticks that is able to write and perform its own musical compositions. To do this, it uses a dataset of 5,000 pieces of music, combined with the latest in deep learning neural network-based AI.

“This is the first example of a robot composing its…