Diva robot learns to sing and dance

Developers in Berlin have built a robot that teaches itself to sing

The one-eyed humanoid, codenamed Myon, plays the lead in a new opera by Nottingham’s Gob Squad theatre company. It’s called My Square Lady and draws on the myth of Pygmalion, who sculpted a beautiful woman and fell in love with his creation. However there is no love-interest here. Instead angst prevails: will robots take over my job? Can they feel? Or can they mimic feelings? Interviews with the real cast and backstage staff are projected through Myon’s grainy CCTV-type lens above the stage. They are all worried – apart from the three little interns (echoing Gilbert and Sullivan’s Three Little Maids) who are unpaid anyway and therefore less expensive than any machine that could do their work. Fear not. Myon is not Frankenstein’s monster, but a Chappie–style child-like machine that absorbs knowledge of human behaviour and re-programmes itself accordingly.

Experiments

Team Myon at Berlin’s Beuth Institute are building robots that can teach each of their component parts to behave in certain ways, tackling such issues as: What if you replace the robot’s trained leg with an untrained leg – will the untrained leg learn from the rest of the machine how to perform? How will it do that? And how quickly? On their website, the multi-national team sets out the parameters of the Myon series of experiments:

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“We develop and research morphologies and distributed neural systems for autonomous robots. We are interested specifically in adaptive and robust behaviors. Adaptive here means that the behaviour can adapt to the environment and to the body of the robot. Therefore, it is essential that robots are allowed to move freely within a real environment (which in technical jargon is called Embodiment and Situatedness).

The investigated morphologies and controllers are developed in analogy to the nervous system of humans and animals, i.e. the sensorimotor control loops are intended to mimic the structure and dynamics of a brain to a certain abstraction level. “

To test Myon’s capabilities, the opera singers run the gamut of human emotions with an eclectic collection of musical tableaux. Small children dressed as cardboard robots perform the meltingly beautiful Sanctus from The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace composed by Karl Williams near the end of World War II. Powerful soloists belt out some of the saddest arias in the history of music by Dvorak, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms and Bizet. Light relief is provided by Benjamin Britten and (yes really) Robbie Williams’s Feel .  It’s a mish mash that would confuse the most clear-headed human, but Myon appears to utilise all the music, colours, costumes and conversations to create an endearing little personality for itself. Or is it herself, a square lady?

Transformation

The story, popularised in the twentieth century by George Bernard Shaw, has already had several re-treads as My Fair Lady the film and musical in which a cockney flower-seller is transformed into a debutante by training her to drop the working-class accent and speak in Received Pronunciation. Critic Rebecca Jacobson, speaking on FI’s radio show PassW0rd on Resonance FM, points out that there is a similar transformation in Jewish mythology, also recently staged in Berlin, in which a clay creature comes to life as the Golem. Berlin Komische Oper’s version, My Square Lady received rapturous applause from a packed house. Maybe Myon cannot experience or reproduce feelings. But he certainly evoked empathy from the audience, and the piece raises important issues about what it means to be human, even if it does not wholly succeed as a piece of theatre.

For the developers, we the audience are part of the experiment: Myon has been specially built to look approachable and friendly, to encourage humans to talk to it, providing data to feed its language-learning and emotion-faking tasks. Team leader Professor Dr Manfred Hild has edited a book Language Grounding in Robots using Myon’s performance over the past two years – not just in the opera but also at exhibitions and demonstration across Europe.

Modular design

The robot’s modular design could potentially assist humans who have lost a limb, since – as demonstrated onstage – all the component parts can easily  be dismembered and reassembled, yet when they are complete they interact through the electronic equivalent of a central nervous system. And of course, friendly-seeming robots are already replacing receptionists in some Japanese banks and department stores, whilst disembodied robot-entities take over the jobs of call centre workers and online help chatbots. As reported earlier in FI, it is creative and people-based careers that will survive for longest in the sticky hands of humans. Myon Teams in universities across Germany, in Paris, France and Kanagawa, Japan are collaborating with Bayer Materials Science to bring robots out of the laboratories and into emotion-rich situations where the humans are also part of the experiment. It is only a matter of time before the sons and daughters of Myon take over those creative and caring roles, too.