Dapple Back

When Analogik crew were just kids we all wondered about the future and what the world would be like in the 21 st century. Although flying cars are still in their most experimental stage, there is no teleportation or inter-stellar space travel, there are a few quite exciting things around that are gradually making their way into our lives. Some technologies have been on a slow evolutionary infiltration path and some… well, some have arrived with a bang!

Asimo is a robot. Its makers at Honda claim the inspiration came from the legendary fictional character Astroboy and its name is for Advanced Step in Innovative MObility. Although officially denied, we would still like to think that his name comes from the father of The Three Laws of Robotics, visionary, prophet, and the greatest science fiction writer of our time – Mr Isaac Asimov. In order to be politically correct and in line with Mr. Asimov’s vision, one must refer to Asimo as ‘it’ and not ‘he’ or ‘she’ and when referring to its full name one shall use the following format: R. Asimo Honda (Where ‘R.’ stands for Robot).

Being only seven years old and 130 cm tall, R. Asimo has already seen more of this planet than most of us humans, capturing hearts of kids and attention of their parents. Its job is not a simple one, and certainly not one to be taken lightly. Being Honda’s mascot and a spokesman, R. Asimo must perform without failure. To ensure that things run smoothly Honda’s robotic representative has its very own support team who make sure his performance runs smoothly and step in case of an unlikely emergency (it happens to all professional performers at least in one stage in their career).

Kudos to Honda’s marketing team and companies’ initiative to use their cutting edge technology and invest a bit on a costly side project with no immediate commercial benefit. Quite frankly we expected something like this from Toyota – but they seem to have been blinded by their continuous commercial success and missed a great opportunity to represent their company by something as cool and awesome as a robot – a robot that features all advanced technology developed by one company in once small artificial being.

So how intelligent is R. Asimo really? At the beginning of the show, its human stage partner lists all the things R. Asimo can do – and one of them is ‘talk’. We found this to be a bit of a misleading statement. Asimo could probably be programmed to play a number of pre-recorded messages, also perhaps equipped with a text to speech mechanism or even made to generate its own responses based on dialog input; this is far from what the audience at the ASIMO HON DA show were made to believe. R. Asimo seemed to respond in a choreographed manner with a cued human voice message which has either been pre-recorded or spoken live by a human behind a microphone.

Nevertheless, R. Asimo’s motoric skills are highly impressive, starting from smooth motion, depth perception, motion recognition and coordination. Did we mention it can also walk at 2.7 km per hour and run at impressive 6km per hour without any evident difficulty (apart form battery life cost).
During the show R. Asimo was also asked to pick up a tray with a drink from a person and served it at the table on the opposite side of the stage, it kicked the football, shook hands, imitated person’s actions, danced and waved at the spectators. It is not clear whether these activities are voice generated or simply cued as part of the entire show choreography in form of a ‘play list’. One would like to believe that it is not the latter; however that would probably have to be a rather optimist view.

R. Asimo’s design is highly adequate for its purpose. Its motion is benign, shape, form and materials combined to create an image that is publicly loveable yet futuristic enough to touch the hearts of the techno lovers like yourself. We shall monitor the progress of Honda’s technology and hope that they release ASIMO V2.0 which could interact and converse. Maybe one day in our lifetime (ASIMO V10?) we witness something that can be described as sentient.
We are of opinion that Honda is following the right direction in development of clean fuel vehicles (hydrogen engine) and hope other manufacturers adopt similar concepts. Although the whole Honda show was woven with promotional messages in quite a cheesy show really, we were quite pleased with the whole picture looking at everything from ‘above’.

Just imagine a circus tent, ticket office painted in the vintage-style illustrated ASIMO with rays bursting in the background, posters, line-up of excited kids with their parents, holding hands. And inside? A first reasonably real-motion humanoid robot, having a ‘job’, representing a company. What a beautiful and almost romantic naïveté. The only thing that was missing was an announcer boy saying “Hoi, hoi, for one night only, a real, live, walking and talking robot – get your tickets at the box office – one night only! Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the future!”

Source: University of Rochester
Researchers at the University of Rochester have digitally reproduced music in a file nearly 1,000 times smaller than a regular MP3 file. The music, a 20-second clarinet solo, is encoded in less than a single kilobyte, and is made possible by two innovations: recreating in a computer both the real-world physics of a clarinet and the physics of a clarinet player.

The achievement, announced today at the International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing held in Las Vegas, is not yet a flawless reproduction of an original performance, but the researchers say it’s getting close.

“This is essentially a human-scale system of reproducing music,” says Mark Bocko, professor of electrical and computer engineering and co-creator of the technology. “Humans can manipulate their tongue, breath, and fingers only so fast, so in theory we shouldn’t really have to measure the music many thousands of times a second like we do on a CD. As a result, I think we may have found the absolute least amount of data needed to reproduce a piece of music.”

In replaying the music, a computer literally reproduces the original performance based on everything it knows about clarinets and clarinet playing. Two of Bocko’s doctoral students, Xiaoxiao Dong and Mark Sterling, worked with Bocko to measure every aspect of a clarinet that affects its soundfrom the backpressure in the mouthpiece for every different fingering, to the way sound radiates from the instrument. They then built a computer model of the clarinet, and the result is a virtual instrument built entirely from the real-world acoustical measurements.

The team then set about creating a virtual player for the virtual clarinet. They modeled how a clarinet player interacts with the instrument including the fingerings, the force of breath, and the pressure of the player’s lips to determine how they would affect the response of the virtual clarinet. Then, says Bocko, it’s a matter of letting the computer “listen” to a real clarinet performance to infer and record the various actions required to create a specific sound. The original sound is then reproduced by feeding the record of the player’s actions back into the computer model.

At present the results are a very close, though not yet a perfect, representation of the original sound.

“We are still working on including ‘tonguing,’ or how the player strikes the reed with the tongue to start notes in staccato passages,” says Bocko. “But in music with more sustained and connected notes the method works quite well and it’s difficult to tell the synthesized sound from the original.”

As the method is refined the researchers imagine that it may give computer musicians more intuitive ways to create expressive music by including the actions of a virtual musician in computer synthesizers. And although the human vocal tract is highly complex, Bocko says the method may in principle be extended to vocals as well.

The current method handles only a single instrument at a time, however in other work in the University’s Music Research Lab with post-doctoral researcher Gordana Velikic and Dave Headlam, professor of music theory at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music, the team has produced a method of separating multiple instruments in a mix so the two methods can be combined to produce a very compact recording.

Bocko believes that the quality will continue to improve as the acoustic measurements and the resulting synthesis algorithms become more accurate, and he says this process may represent the maximum possible data compression of music.

“Maybe the future of music recording lies in reproducing performers and not recording them,” says Bocko.

Writing electronic music may seem like an easy task at first. All who have tried have realised that there is a difference between writing a piece that sounds either amateurish or too commercial and creating something truly unique. Electronic music is supposed to be opening new horizons towards melodic and rhythmic structures that are not limited by physical properties of natural instruments and its musicians.
At this website we will help you to divide to mystic world of electronic music. Enjoy!

Writing electronic music may seem like an easy task at first. All who have tried have realised that there is a difference between writing a piece that sounds either amateurish or too commercial and creating something truly unique. Electronic music is supposed to be opening new horizons towards melodic and rhythmic structures that are not limited by physical properties of natural instruments and its musicians.

One can argue though, that the removal of all such intermediaries brings the composer a step closer to the ultimate barrier. Of course, we’re talking about inspiration. There are a plenty of audio samples and software packages out there, in fact maybe too many. Machines are increasingly fast and humans increasingly impatient which inevitably leads to a path where machines will be able to interface with the composer on almost an organic level and reward the musician with an instant result.

Unfortunately we’re not quite there yet and it will be some time until we reach that level. But let’s reflect on this exciting time where technology and science flourish and draw our inspiration from this dynamic and uplifting era.