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"...the elements of cyberpunk have dissolved into the whole SF genre, so it’s hard to find anyone writing who doesn’t owe serious debts to Gibson and his crew."
- Richard Morgan
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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. |
| 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
| Gentle Monster Robot Head |
| Burro Robot Follows You And Gets Smarter |
| Auto-Targeting Fire Sprinkler Systems Now Reality |
| LEONARDO Robot Has Legs And Thrusters, Can Skateboard, Slackline |
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'Employees above a certain level were implanted with advanced microprocessors...'
'The robot knelt before the head, lifted it slowly, and with... its strong hands placed it on its shoulders...'
'But it had slid, not rolled, down upon these angry fly-wheels, and in an instant, with all our friends, it had been hurled into the sky!'
'Three rows of four colored dots appeared on the heel of my left hand.'
'I brought it back to the ship, charged it up, reprogrammed the inertia chips and voila!'
'Their playmates were not “real,” but they were a lot realer than, say, a Betsy-Wetsy doll.'
'pirate three-vee satellites sanded out of orbit...'
'Oh, there you are! the balloon piped at the amorphous mass of living tissue...'
