Check this out – this video demonstrates using an iPhone app, ZOOZbeat, to improvise in traditional jazz styles and then to beam the music to an autonomous music robot, Shimon, that picks up the improvised iPhone riffs and runs with them.

“Shimon combines computational modeling of  music perception, interaction, and improvisation with capacity to produce melodic and harmonic acoustic responses through choreographic gestures,” says ZOOZbeat Chief Technology Officer Dr. Gil Weinberg. “Shimon, therefore, listens like a human and improvises like a machine.”

Here’s another mind-blowing example of Weinberg’s robotic virtual musicians in action:

This video captures a jam session between two humans and two robots: Haile, the perceptual robotic drummer detects the beat played by a human darbuka player and improvises based the human’s input. Shimon, the robotic marimba player, joins the session, detecting the beat and improvising based on the analyzed scale played by as human piano player.

The work comes from Gil Weinberg’s Robotic Musicianship Group at Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology. Students: Trishul Mallikarjuna, Aparna Raman and Brian Blosser.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBR3Ec2zX2A

This video, from the Science Channel series Popular Sciences Future of: Pleasure, takes a look at Weinberg and Zoozbeat.