Towards the Development of Robot Musical Audition

We are seeking to enable humanoid robots to participate in live human-robot musical ensembles. In ensembles, the musicians must be able to listen to the audio that they and the others are producing in order to identify high-level features of the music (e.g., location in the score, tempo, cues). This information is crucial for the musicians so that they can know what to play next. One requirement for robots capable of participating in musical ensembles is, therefore, the ability to listen to the music and identify some of these features. While other sensory input is also important (vision, for example, could enable a robot to determine what a conductor is indicating), many of these fields already have a significant amount of active research. Robot vision, for example, is a popular topic in the research community. By contrast, a comparatively small amount of research is performed on robot musical audition. We therefore feel it is important for us to pursue research in this field.