M3: Melody Slot Machine with RoboSax

Masatoshi Hamanaka received a Ph.D. in Engineering from the University of Tsukuba, Japan, in 2003. He is currently a leader of the Music Information Intelligence team at Center for Advanced Intelligence Project, RIKEN. His research interest is in music information technology and biomedical and unmanned aircraft systems. He received the Journal of New Music Research Distinguished Paper Award in 2005, SIGGRAPH2019 Emerging Technologies Laval Virtual Revolution Research Jury Prize in 2019, IJCAI-19 Most Entertaining Video Award in 2019, Augmented Human International Conference Best Poster Paper Award in 2021, and International Conference on Multimedia Modeling Best Demonstration Award in 2024.

Gou Koutaki received a Doctor of Engineering from Kumamoto University, Japan, in 2007. He joined the Production Engineering Research Laboratory, Hitachi, Ltd., in 2007 and is currently a professor at Kumamoto University. His research interests include image processing and musical-instrument support systems. He was originally a researcher in computer vision and has presented papers at CVPR, ICCV, SIGGRAPH technical paper, IJCV, etc., but is currently designing and manufacturing robotic instruments.

The four performers of the Robo Sax Quartet are as follows. They are undergraduate students at Kumamoto University and members of the Wind Orchestra Club.

Kotomi Hisano, Robo-Soprano Sax Ambi Tanaka, Robo-Alto Sax Sho Fujii, Robo-Tenor Sax Keisuke Mizuta, Robo-Baritone Sax

Melody Slot Machine with RoboSax is our AI-based Melody Slot Machine that controls a robot-based RoboSax. Melody Slot Machine is a dial with the staves of music displayed on an iPad, which can be rotated to change the melody variations. The melody variations are generated on the basis of the AI-based melody-morphing method and can be partially switched to another variation without any significant change in the overall melody structure and with no musical breakdown. The microcomputer on the RoboSax receives the MIDI note from Melody Slot Machine and moves the servomotor so that the fingering corresponds to the note number.