Shimon, a four-armed robot with a ball-like head, holds small mallets(球棍) in "hands" to play a kind of music called a marimba. As he plays, his head moves around in time to the music.
Using "deep learning", Shimon was taught to write his own music. He could not only make up his own music, but do it in real time, while playing with other musicians. This is called "improvising".
Now he is back with a whole bunch of new tricks. He can write the words to his own songs, and sing them. Shimon learned to write the words for the songs the same way he learned to write music – by being "fed" thousands of examples. Shimon was trained on the lyrics (歌词) to 50,000 songs.
Georgia Tech professor Gil Weinberg, who leads the Shimon project, gets Shimon going with a starting idea. Shimon then writes the lyrics based around that idea. Mr. Weinberg usually provides much of the music for the songs, but Shimon helps out there, too.
Singing the songs is another story. To give Shimon a voice, the Georgia Tech team worked with experts at Pompeu Fabra University. The voice was created using AI and sounds very much like a man.
Later this spring, the team plans to put out an album of about 8-10 of Shimon's songs. The album will be released on the music streaming service Spotify. There are also plans for Shimon to go on tour with a band to play and sing his songs live.
For Mr. Weinberg, that's the main goal behind the Shimon Project – not to have robots take over, but to have robots and humans make something beautiful together.
