Let the creature play
Who can be musical?
There is a lot of elements which make a creature. One of the elements that came to my mind when thinking about what makes a human, was the element of being creative.
Creativity is quite a broad subject - it includes everything
from painting, writing, movie making, dance, etc.
But through my search I got stuck on the idea of musicality.
It seems obvious that you can teach a robot how to play a specific musical piece - Mozart, The Killers, Taylor Swift or whatever you love to listen to.
But can you teach it to follow the beat? To play its own melody?
That is the idea for my musical creature.
Shimon the Robot
An example of a musical creature is Shimon.
Shimon is a four-armed robot marimba player built by Gil Weinberg and his team at Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology.
Shimon listens to music, improvises, and plays alongside human musicians.
A concert with Shiman took place at the Moogfest Festival in North Carolina.
Enjoy it in the video above.
Find your musician creature
From looking at Shimon playing the keyboard I got the idea, that you could create different creatures playing each their own instrument.
As there is a world of different instruments there can also be a lot of different musical creatures.
Each of them engaged in their instrument as part of your band or as a solo artist. - playing, for instance, the drums, the piano or the guitar.
The drummer
The pianist
The guitarist
A musical human has a hard time standing still when the music is playing. Therefore, of course, the musical creature must also have rhythm and move to the music.
This part of the musical element will come to life in the bodies of the creatures, which will 'rock to rhythm'.
So the idea is to create a musical creature, that does not only know the accords and tones, but knows itself, how to combine them so it sounds good - and so that you want to move to the music.