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"By the time I can take people out to where Hubble is looking, they won't be human anymore, by a long way."
- Larry Niven
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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
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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
- HandelBot Helps Two-Handed Robots Learn Piano
- Humanoid Robots Tickle The Ivories
| Epirus High-Power Microwave Defeats Drones |
| It's A Giant Robot! You Reporters Have Been Warned! |
| Tactile Skin Supplier Map |
| Robot Bees 3D Printed By Festo |
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'Our study of your race has convinced us that you are not fitted to leave your planet in the present state of your civilization.'
'...the spreading beam of the deranging ray struck them, and Then one toppled and fell. Then another.'
'Within seconds the material was spread out over fifty yards, in a matter of hours it might occupy several cubic miles of space...'
'The men are dead, but their acquired wisdom lives on and I am the beneficiary.'
'Young people found the driverless car admirable for petting.'
'After twenty generations of shillyshallying...'
