Now here is something creepy – a disembodied robot head that can sing. Bad enough that it has no body, but for kids who have just been exposed to their first horror movie, they might not want this particular piece of robotics to help sing them to sleep when counting sheep and drinking hot milk fails. Those eyes don’t blink, and you can never quite tell just which disconcerted spirit wandering around who has a vendetta against you will possess it, having her lunge at your jugular with her false molars and incisors.
This particular robot head hails from Taiwan, and what places her above the rest (no idea on how many other singing robot heads you can find out there), she is slightly different since she is able to read music. How so, you ask? For starters, she will snap a photo of a particular musical score that is in front of her using built-in cameras at her eyes, where an algorithm will be able to determine the pitch, rhythm, and lyrics before sending it over to the robot’s voice synthesizer.
You won’t be getting sold out crowds waiting to listen to her sing, but at least it is something different compared to other kinds of robots we’ve seen in the past. The brains behind this robot? Chyi-Yeu Lin and colleagues at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology.