Artists Statement

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.

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.

• Garth Paine holds a joint appointment as Associate Professor in the School of Arts Media and Engineering and the School of Music at Arizona State University, USA. His specialities are digital music and sound and interactive performance. He is particularly fascinated with sound as an exhibitable object where the listener can spend time with the sonic artifact so that they feel truly present. This passion has led to several interactive responsive environments where the inhabitant generates the sonic landscape through their presence and behaviour, to fixed media compositions and to several music scores for dance works, generated through realtime video tracking and or bio-sensing of the dancers. His work has been shown throughout Australia, Europe, Japan, USA, Hong Kong, Korea and New Zealand. activatedspace.com.
• Michael Krzyzaniak is a PhD student in Media Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University, USA, where he studies perceived empathy in human-machine interaction. He does this in musical contexts where subtle nuances of a human’s or machine’s playing can effect the perceived emotional content of the music. He is interested in the synergy between machines and humans during musical interactions. michaelkrzyzaniak.com.