Toward Developing a Violin Playing Robot - Bowing by Anthropomorphic Robot Arm and Sound Analysis

The purpose of this study is to develop a violin playing robot that can produce expressive sounds by considering kansei, which is a Japanese word whose meaning resembles sensibility. The goal of this paper is to realize bowing by an anthropomorphic robot arm and to analyze the sounds it produces. First, we propose a model of information flow in musical instrument playing, which is a key concept of this study. Then, we describe the anthropomorphic robotic arm for bowing that we made. Finally, analysis results of the sounds produced by the robot are described. By comparing the sounds produced by an inexperienced person and the robot, we found that the natural frequency of the bow affects robot´s sounds.