Giant Steps

For my first blog post outside of class, I decided I would bring up a youtube video that astonished me. I am a saxophone performance major, as well as journalism, so I figured that bringing up the sax would be a good starting point. This youtube video is showing a Japanese robot that was designed to play the saxophone. The robot plays "Giant Steps" by John Coltrane, a very famous jazz tune.



Like I said, I don't know how to do this very well, so I'm not sure how to include just the video instead of the link.

Regardless, the video is just amazing. The fact that this Japanese company (Takashima R&C Laboratory) built a robot that can do what a human does while playing the saxophone, is absolutely unreal, and very weird to us saxophone players. Besides pressing the right keys at the right times, the air flow, mouth position on the mouthpiece, reed, everything has to be just right to get out a good sound. Though the sound produced is slightly mechanical, it is still unbelievable that pieces of metal and circuit board could be strewn together to make art.

Or is it art? It's sad that John Coltrane's music could be duplicated by something without any emotions. Music was named so after the muses, whose pursuit was for truth and beauty. All seems lost when a machine can play what someone once poured his soul into.

And, for the musicians, this seems like a threat. In the future, will humans not be needed and instead, only metal replicas used to save money, time, and energy? Maybe I'm getting a little ahead of myself. Either way, it's incredible that this company created a musician out of metal.