Here’s a rare clip of Marvin the Paranoid Android. You know, from BBC’s 1981 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy TV series. Appropriately he is singing the “Marvin the Paranoid Android” song on Blue Peter. It’s very strange and makes me glad that I grew up here in the good old US of A.
A pair of Robonova-1 kit robots teamed up with “Chi” (Naoki Nokubo) of the pop-trio Shūchishin for a special performance on Fuji TV’s “The Best House 1-2-3″ variety show last night. The new trio is named “Robo-Shūchishin”. They performed “Shūchishin,” the original group’s self-titled hit single.
Sure, the robot members sang off-key and sounded…well, robotic, but there were some surprises. Skip to about 1:20 into the video. Three guesses as to what happens.
These two “warbling” robots have been programmed by composer/computer scientist Eduardo Miranda. Miranda, from the UK’s University of Plymouth, programmed the bots to create unique songs together. The first robot produces a string of about 60 random notes, then the second bot produces its own random melody. The first robot compares the two pieces and decides if they’re similar, in which case it nods so that the second robot memorizes the sequence and can play the song again. If the noises don’t go together, the first bot will shake its head and the sequence will be abandoned.
So far they have “evolved” the ability to sing 20 songs together. Miranda developed the bots so that he could “compose music that no human would ever come up with”. Here’s a video of the singing robots in action. Miranda compares the project to the emergence of simplistic, shared culture between humans.
Honest to God, I thought the singing Elvis robot from WowWee was history. Turns out that some people just have not had enough of him yet. Instructables user GW Jax has created the Elvinator, which combines “The King” with the Terminator. Which leads to the question: If you’re gonna give the king a terminator upgrade, which is better, Fat or normal elvis? I think fat elvis is much more menacing.
The Elvinator is only halfway finished. So far GW Jax has only given the king burned/melted face and an LED eye. Soon he’ll add a Jaw piston for better mouth movement, give him custom phrases, and make it interactive with voice recognition and the ability to “learn.”
Looks like John Connor has a new problem to worry about.
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 Robots are a fact of life. Soon they will kill us. We’d like to document the coming apocalypse. |
