Students: Athanasios Cosse & Nolan Jetter
Project: Autonomously driven robotic system to generate and play novel piano songs | View Poster (PDF)
Major: Mechanical Engineering
Advisor: Ebru Demir
Abstract
The art of both producing music and subsequently carrying out this creation are inherently human—and thus the whole of the process can be taken as a fundamentally creative process. A musical piece is composed using both established rules and phrases, but also would undoubtedly be incomplete without the human aspects. The emotion, style, and interpretation imbued in a song is fundamentally what makes music meaningful. However, there are also rote and repetitive parts to music that can be automated away with technology. This project explores the components of this automation and its relationship to music. We design three independent components: a pair of robotic biomimetic hands controlled along the length of the piano via a linear actuator system, a generative AI model that is capable of producing new music from a randomized sequence of input data, and a reinforcement learning model that predicts the optimal actions for the robot to take given the desired sequence of notes to be played. By training the reinforcement learning model on both generated musical sequences and random sequences, as well as in a simulation space and on the robot, we provide the model ample opportunity to optimize its playing patterns. Combining these components allows us to produce a robotic system that feels fundamentally quite human and creative, but is undoubtedly missing what makes a human human.
About Athanasios Cosse
Athanasios is a senior Mechanical engineer at Lehigh University. He is interested in pursuing a graduate degree in robotics after graduation. Athanasios wants to use his talents in the future to help people regain limb function through robotics after limb amputation. He is also interested in applications of brain-computer interfaces in the context of assistive technologies.
In addition to his academic pursuits, Athanasios plays soccer on the Lehigh Men’s Soccer team. He also likes to learn about emerging technologies and their applications. The Undergraduate Research Symposium has allowed him and Nolan Jetter to showcase their work in creating a biomimetic piano playing robot which will be the building block of their future research in the area.
About Nolan Jetter
Hi, my name is Nolan. I am a senior studying both mechanical engineering and biology. As a young boy growing up in California, I loved to play sports and spend time outside in nature. Luckily, my parents exposed me to almost every activity conceivable, and I was able to find many passions with the choices provided. Being surrounded by what I saw as so many successful and complete people instilled in me a drive to become better. As I got into high school this drive was conferred to the classroom and particularly the natural sciences. I was interested in how the world worked, but also how one could change it and what that meant about one’s relationship with it. These interests evolved as I got into college—I became interested in what intelligence means, and how one can use a subset of this intelligence (engineering) to overcome our biological constraints.