Eduardo Miranda shuts the door of his study, leaving two 鈥渨arbling鈥� robots to their own devices. He has programmed them to blurt out sequences of random notes, and two weeks later, he returns to find that the robots are still cooing in their eerily human voices, but they have now 鈥渆volved鈥� to sing a repertoire of 20 sounds together.
Miranda, a composer and computer scientist at the University of Plymouth in the UK, hopes that such collaborations between singing robots will one day help him to compose music that no human would ever come up with. 鈥淭he robots develop their own musical culture. There are no pre-programmed musical rules.鈥�
Miranda equips each robot with software that mimics the human voice, and gives each a microphone that acts as its ears and a camera for its eyes. One robot starts by babbling a random sequence of about six notes. When the second robot hears this, it responds with a babble of its own. The first robot then compares the two strings of notes. If it deems them to be similar, it nods. The second robot detects this and 鈥渕emorises鈥� the settings that created the sequence. If the noises are dissimilar, the first robot shakes its head, causing its partner to discard, or 鈥渇orget鈥�, that sequence.
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Since only those sounds that both robots know about are recorded, (Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, ). Miranda likens this to the emergence of a very simplistic, shared culture.
