The Detroit Symphony Orchestra has played host to some of the biggest names in the conducting world. But Tuesday night, a different kind of celebrity held the baton at Orchestra Hall. This conductor was short both in stature and on words.
ASIMO is not your typical conductor. It’s gender neutral, stands at a little over 4 feet tall and has no pulse. It’s a humanoid robot that made its conducting debut last night in Detroit.
It walked onto the stage to thunderous applause worthy of Leonard Bernstein.
“Hello, everyone,” it said.
“Hello,” the audience responded.
Then, ASIMO gracefully walked to the center of the stage, bowed and began leading the orchestra in a performance of “The Impossible Dream” from the musical Man of La Mancha.
ASIMO, which stands for Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility, is a robot designed and built by Honda. One of its main goals is to get kids interested in math and science. But Tuesday night, ASIMO took a stab at conducting.
This sort of thing always seems to make the news. I wonder what would have happened if a violinist with the orchestra had further astonished the public by placing an MP3 player on his chair and staying home? Since the live conductor took the day off, why not the players? It’s only slightly dumber than the Boston Pops Orchestra’s never-ending fascination with Star Wars music, conducted by robots from that never-ending series. At least those had a live human inside the costume.
“has no pulse” – probably sums up the performance.
Pageantmaster: Actually, when I heard about this on NPR the other day, the general concensus was that there was too much “pulse.” The “conductor” was basically an elaborate metronome. No soul whatsoever.
From the clip I saw on tv, I’d say that was accurate. It just moved the baton back and forth, up and down.
Frankly, I enjoy it when non-musicians take up the baton, for example, the films of the late Danny Kaye, who could not read music in spite of a wonderful career in semi-musical films, conducting an orchestra. Totally funny, and yet, they played the piece flawlessly. “Start from the part that goes la-de-de-dum, dum-dum, you know where it is.”
A perfect solution to TEC’s cratering demographics–program him to sit in a pew and beep excitedly when the MDGs are mentioned.
As a sometime instrumentalist (in the musical, not the philosophical sense!) I would have found ASIMO pretty difficult to follow — kind of like a human conductor on an overdose of Valium. In fact, the first couple of beats of the ritardando two measures from the end didn’t seem to match ASIMO very well at all. Slatkin’s job is safe.
Steven in Falls Church [5], I think ASIMO could easily set its sights a little higher than the rapidly shrinking domain of the pew — by the current trends it could easily be the next occupant of the address space at index 032F (‘815’ in the human decimal system) at the zip code 2721 (‘10017’ to us humans.) Besides, “beeping excitedly” in church is surely beyond the pale for the “frozen chosen.” 😉
#5: Watch your sexism! ASIMO is an ‘it’, not a ‘he’. But I agree ASIMO could be an answer to Tec’s emptying pews as it would fit in well: “It’s gender neutral, stands at a little over 4 feet tall and has no pulse.”