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"We were essentially being shell-shocked by rapid change. That was one of the things you needed science-fiction writers for back in the Sixties, because we could cope with the future."
- Peter Watts
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| Robot Pianist | ||
| A robot learns the fine art of playing classical music on the piano. |
The Maestro instructs his robot Rollo (the Rolleindex Personal Robot, model M-3) in playing an unusual apparatus - the piano.
"No, not for yours, Rollo," the Maestro said softly. "Mozart and Chopin are not for vacuum tubes and fuses and copper wire. They are for flesh and blood and human tears..."
"I should like to be taught how to produce these notes on the piano. I request that you feed the correlation between those dots and the levers of the panel into my memory banks."
After the Maestro instructs Rollo, he goes to sleep, leaving Rollo at the piano. The Maestro awakens, hearing beautiful music.
"Mozart? Chopin?" The duralloy sphere that was Rollo's head shone stark and featureless, its immediate surface unbroken but for twin vision lenses. "The terms are not included in my memory banks."
| The light over the music rack was an eerie island in the brown shadows of the studio. Rollo sat at the keyboard, prim, inhuman, rigid, twin lenses focused somewhere off into the shadows.
The massive feet working the pedals, arms and hands flashing and glinting - they were living entities, separate, somehow, from the machined perfection of his body. |
| Technovelgy from Virtuoso,
by Herbert Goldstone. Published by Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1953 Additional resources -
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Tech news articles related to Virtuoso
Tech news articles related to works by Herbert Goldstone
Robot Pianist-related
news articles:
- Miuro Autonomous Music Robot
- Robot Taiko Drummers Give Up Factory Day Jobs
- Jambot Music Improvisation Robot
- ETH Quadcopters Perform Jingle Bells On Real Piano
- HRP-2 Auld Lang Syne Theremin
- Hexapod Robot Scuttles Through Beethoven
- Melomics Avant Garde Computer Musician
- Jazz AI Compliments Of DARPA
- Ardu McDuino, Bagpipe Robot
- AI Musicians Reach For The Top Of The Charts
- Compressorhead Robotic Band Jams
| Artificial Skin For Robots Is Coming Right Along |
| Robot Guard Dog On Duty |
| Wearable Artificial Fabric Muscles |
| Dancing Robots Taught Dance Moves |
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'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
'It's so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself...'
'Heavy penalties... were to be applied to any one found driving manually-controlled machines.'
'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature...'
