Shimon does not act alone, he plays in a band and his fellow band mates are human. They have already performed in places like the Kennedy Center and all their songs are original. The robot is the brainchild of Gil Weinberg, a professor of music technology at the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, and his team.

Al robot Shimon has in his memory a database of around 40,000 rock and jazz songs and all their lyrics. But as a lyricist, you don’t just combine words, you go further. It has semantic ability and is able to establish relationships between similar themes, such as love or breakup. You can also take general ideas like “summer” and write the letters on them.

According to Richard Savery of the Weinberg team, in an interview for IEEE Spectrum, he said that the first step that Shimon takes to write the lyrics of the songs is “generate thousands of phrases” where there are several keywords. Shimon generates a lot of material on, for example, the word “land”, and also generates synonyms and antonyms like “world” and “ocean. “Shimon has a preference for keeping the same feeling, or gradually changing it, as well as trying to keep the rhymes between verses,” says Savaery .On the new album to be released on April 10, Shimon plays alongside a band of people. According to Savery, “each song has some elements that were created by a human, and some by Shimon. Like any band, each of us has their own strengths and weaknesses, and in our case, no one else writes lyrics, so it was natural for Shimon to take on that responsibility. ”The Musical Technology Group of the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona has participated in the construction of Shimon. Weiberg and his team asked for their collaboration to create the robot’s voice synthesizer.

Shimon can play alongside a band of people

Aside from the human voice, the robot has eyebrows, mouths, and eyes. But Weinberg says that “we are big fans of avoiding exaggerated anthropomorphism.” The great innovation has been to give him arms to play the xylophone while singing. These arms can withstand repeated impact of up to 30 blows per second, as well as an intensity range that ranges from pianissimo, very weak, to fortissimo, much stronger.The creators of Shimon want to increase their capabilities.

They are working so that the robot can perform rap “cockfights”. To get there, Shimon has to learn to understand, listen, and respond to the lyrics of others’ songs. The plan is for him to sing the songs from his upcoming Spotify album live.