The Beatbots: A Musician-Informed Multi-Robot Percussion Quartet

TL;DR

The Beatbots are a novel multi-robot percussion system designed with musician feedback, demonstrating unique musical capabilities and positive audience engagement, highlighting the potential of robots in creative musical performances.

Contribution

This work introduces the Beatbots, a musician-informed multi-robot percussion instrument, and provides design principles and insights for future robotic music systems.

Findings

Participants appreciated the playfulness and aesthetics of the robotic performance.

Expert musicians showed positive mindset shifts during the performance.

Audience responses were generally favorable across demographics.

Abstract

Artistic creation is often seen as a uniquely human endeavor, yet robots bring distinct advantages to music-making, such as precise tempo control, unpredictable rhythmic complexities, and the ability to coordinate intricate human and robot performances. While many robotic music systems aim to mimic human musicianship, our work emphasizes the unique strengths of robots, resulting in a novel multi-robot performance instrument called the Beatbots, capable of producing music that is challenging for humans to replicate using current methods. The Beatbots were designed using an ``informed prototyping'' process, incorporating feedback from three musicians throughout development. We evaluated the Beatbots through a live public performance, surveying participants (N=28) to understand how they perceived and interacted with the robotic performance. Results show that participants valued the playfulness of the experience, the aesthetics of the robot system, and the unconventional robot-generated music. Expert musicians and non-expert roboticists demonstrated especially positive mindset shifts during the performance, although participants across all demographics had favorable responses. We propose design principles to guide the development of future robotic music systems and identify key robotic music affordances that our musician consultants considered particularly important for robotic music performance.