“Kiki” presented by Krzyzaniak and Paine

Symposium:

• ISEA2015: 21st International Symposium on Electronic Art
• More presentations from ISEA2015:  

• Kiki

• Michael Krzyzaniak
• Garth Paine

• Art installation involving an interactive drum-playing robot.

  When generating music in collaboration with a human, when is it appropriate for a machine to disrupt the flow of the music by introducing new themes or ideas? Kiki is a robotic djembe player under development at Arizona State University that is designed to explore questions such as this.
  We are currently developing software that will allow Kiki to analyze, synchronize to, interact with, and learn from a human percussionist. This software will analyze the human’s playing in real-time and generate rhythms that are stylistically appropriate.
  Periodically, the learning algorithm will be perturbed, causing the robot to start generating new patterns with no prompting from the human. We would like to demonstrate this system at ISEA. The demonstration would include Kiki and an additional percussion instrument. Visitors could play the percussion instrument, and Kiki would join in and play with them.

Video:

• In this video, Kiki is hard-coded to play a fixed pattern which the human must follow. In the proposed installation, by contrast, the human could play arbitrarily and Kiki would follow along or take the lead, generating rhythms in real-time.