The first amputee to use it, a musician who lost part of his right arm five years ago, is now able to play the piano for the first time since his accident. He can even strum the Star Wars theme song.

“Our prosthetic arm is powered by ultrasound signals,” said Gil Weinberg, the Georgia Tech College of Design professor who leads the project. “By using this new technology, the arm can detect which fingers an amputee wants to move, even if they don’t have fingers.”

Jason Barnes is the amputee working with Weinberg. The 28-year-old was electrocuted during a work accident in 2012, forcing doctors to amputate his right arm just below the elbow. Barnes no longer has his hand and most of his forearm but does have the muscles in his residual limb that control his fingers.

Barnes’ everyday prosthesis is similar to the majority of devices on the market. It’s controlled by electromyogram (EMG) sensors attached to his muscles. He switches the arm into various modes by pressing buttons on the arm. Each mode has two programmed moves, which are controlled by him either flexing or contracting his forearm muscles. For example, flexing allows his index finger and thumb to clamp together; contracting closes his fist.

“EMG sensors aren’t very accurate,” said Weinberg, director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Music Technology. “They can detect a muscle movement, but the signal is too noisy to infer which finger the person wants to move. We tried to improve the pattern detection from EMG for Jason but couldn’t get finger-by-finger control.”

But then the team looked around the lab and saw an ultrasound machine. They partnered with two other Georgia Tech professors – Minoru Shinohara, Chris Fink (College of Sciences) and Levent Degertekin (Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering) — and attached an ultrasound probe to the arm. The same kind of probe doctors use to see babies in the womb could watch how Barnes’ muscles moved.

“That’s when we had a eureka moment,” said Weinberg.

When Barnes tries to move his amputated ring finger, the muscle movements differ from those seen when he tries to move any other digit. Weinberg and the team fed each unique movement into an algorithm that can quickly determine which finger Barnes wants to move. The ultrasound signals and machine learning can detect continuous and simultaneous movements of each finger, as well as how much force he intends to use.

“It’s completely mind-blowing,” said Barnes. “This new arm allows me to do whatever grip I want, on the fly, without changing modes or pressing a button. I never thought we’d be able to do this.”

This is the second device Weinberg’s lab has built for Barnes. His first love is the drums, so the team fitted him with a prosthetic arm with two drumsticks in 2014. He controlled one of the sticks. The other moved on its own by listening to the music in the room and improvising.

The device gave him the chance to drum again. The robotic stick could play faster than any drummer in the world. Worldwide attention has sent Barnes and Weinberg’s robots around the globe for concerts across four continents. They’ve also played at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and Moogfest.

That success pushed Weinberg to take the next step and create something that gives Barnes the dexterity he’s lacked since 2012.

“If this type of arm can work on music, something as subtle and expressive as playing the piano, this technology can also be used for many other types of fine motor activities such as bathing, grooming and feeding,” said Weinberg. “I also envision able-bodied persons being able to remotely control robotic arms and hands by simply moving their fingers.”

Researchers fed the robot nearly 5,000 complete songs — from Beethoven to the Beatles to Lady Gaga to Miles Davis — and more than 2 million motifs, riffs and licks of music. Aside from giving the machine a seed, or the first four measures to use as a starting point, no humans are involved in either the composition or the performance of the music.

The first two compositions are roughly 30 seconds in length. The robot, named Shimon, can be seen and heard playing them here and here.

Ph.D. student Mason Bretan is the man behind the machine. He’s worked with Shimon for seven years, enabling it to “listen” to music played by humans and improvise over pre-composed chord progressions. Now Shimon is a solo composer for the first time, generating the melody and harmonic structure on its own.

“Once Shimon learns the four measures we provide, it creates its own sequence of concepts and composes its own piece,” said Bretan, who will receive his doctorate in music technology this summer at Georgia Tech. “Shimon’s compositions represent how music sounds and looks when a robot uses deep neural networks to learn everything it knows about music from millions of human-made segments.”

Bretan says this is the first time a robot has used deep learning to create music. And unlike its days of improvising, when it played monophonically, Shimon is able to play harmonies and chords. It’s also thinking much more like a human musician, focusing less on the next note, as it did before, and more on the overall structure of the composition.  

“When we play or listen to music, we don’t think about the next note and only that next note,” said Bretan. “An artist has a bigger idea of what he or she is trying to achieve within the next few measures or later in the piece. Shimon is now coming up with higher-level musical semantics. Rather than thinking note by note, it has a larger idea of what it wants to play as a whole.”

Shimon was created by Bretan’s advisor, Gil Weinberg, director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Music Technology.

“This is a leap in Shimon’s musical quality because it’s using deep learning to create a more structured and coherent composition,” said Weinberg, a professor in the School of Music. “We want to explore whether robots could become musically creative and generate new music that we humans could find beautiful, inspiring and strange.”

Shimon will create more pieces in the future. As long as the researchers feed it a different seed, the robot will produce something different each time — music that the researchers can’t predict. In the first piece, Bretan fed Shimon a melody comprised of eighth notes. It received a sixteenth note melody the second time, which influenced it to generate faster note sequences.

Bretan acknowledges that he can’t pick out individual songs that Shimon is referencing. He is able to recognize classical chord progression and influences of artists, such as Mozart, for example.

“They sound like a fusion of jazz and classical,” said Bretan, who plays the keyboards and guitar in his free time. “I definitely hear more classical, especially in the harmony. But then I hear chromatic moving steps in the first piece — that’s definitely something you hear in jazz.”

Shimon’s debut as a solo composer was featured in a video clip in the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) keynote and will have its first live performance at the Aspen Ideas Festival at the end of June. It’s the latest project within Weinberg’s lab. He and his students have also created a robotic prosthesis for a drummer, a robotic third arm for all drummers, and an interactive robotic companion that plays music from a phone and dances to the beat.

Alexander Lerch, a researcher at the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, and his Ph.D. student are helping technology move in that direction. They are conducting research on machine learning and music information retrieval, which enables the extraction of information from audio files.

The more we know about music, the more we can understand how music affects people. For example, we want to know why music can make you have goose bumps. Ultimately, we might be able to create music that triggers that response, Lerch said.

He said that his research is where the industry is headed, and search engines, music streaming services, ads, and content providers could use the results.

Lerch and the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology (GTCMT) have received industry sponsorship for this research. It is the Center’s first industry sponsorship to solely support student research.

Gracenote, an entertainment data and technology company, is funding the research of this Ph.D. student. Gracenote’s technology powers the top music services, consumer electronics companies, automakers, media companies, and cable and satellite operators.

Markus Cremer, Vice President of Applied Research at Gracenote, declined to talk specifically about this research, but he said the company definitely finds this research important. “These technologies are particularly useful for browsing through large catalogs of songs quickly and efficiently,” he said.

“Gracenote has actively supported the research community in this field for more than a decade,” Cremer noted.

“Alexander’s team at Georgia Tech stands out as one of just a very few that effectively combines research focus with applicability,” he said. “We’ve been impressed with the level of knowledge, passion and problem-solving skills we have seen from everyone coming out of the Georgia Tech program from new hires to interns.”

Gil Weinberg echoes this praise for Lerch, who is also an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Music.

Weinberg, director of the Center, said Lerch came to Georgia Tech with an impressive background both in academia and industry.

“It is not surprising therefore that he would be the first faculty to bring industry research sponsorship to GTCMT. Gracenote's sponsorships demonstrates that Alexander’s groundbreaking research in music informatics can lead to strong impact not only in academic circles, but also in the continuously growing music technology industry,” he said.

Ph.D. student Siddharth Kumar Gururani is working with Lerch. He had been enrolled in the master’s program and did so well that after one year Lerch said they chose to invite him to join the Ph.D. program.

"Combining my computer science research with my passion for music was always a dream. Gracenote and the Center for Music Technology enabled me to do exactly that with the (music information retrieval) project," Gururani said.

Gururani has been working with Lerch for a few months now, and hopefully will be able to continue the research.

Cremer said that Gracenote plans to continue funding the research beyond the initial nine months.

Lerch said the field of music information retrieval is only about 10 to 15 years old and he is only one of a few people doing this work. He combines his engineering and music training in his research, which is at the intersection of signal processing, artificial intelligence, and music analysis.

His research focuses on creating the next generation of music software technology, enabling new ways of understanding, creating, accessing, and listening to music. His main research areas are Music Information Retrieval, Audio Content Analysis, and Intelligent Signal Processing.

Leigh is the associate dean for research in the College and last fall secured a grant from the National Science Foundation National Robotics Initiative to study the U.S. robotics industry and its economic impacts. She also is a professor in the School of City and Regional Planning.

She gave us her thoughts on robotics research and the industry.

1. Why should anyone research the robotics industry?

Robots are being developed and “employed” across the economy, on farms, in factories, warehouses, hotels and hospitals, to name just a few types of businesses using them. They will fundamentally transform daily life and work. Researchers are essential to making that transformation happen from a creative and technical perspective. They also have a key role to play in ensuring that robotics diffusion is not simply imposed upon society in a way the causes winners and losers, but, rather, leads to robotics’ full potential for enhancing all human experience and safeguarding the physical world.

2. How will robots affect city and regional planning?

City and regional planning includes a number of specializations that focus on the world in which we live, such as economic development, environment, housing, land use, and transportation. Robotics diffusion will affect all of these areas, but, currently, the most attention is being given to how autonomous vehicles (a kind of robot) will alter our transportation infrastructure, as well as greatly reduce the number of driver jobs.

3. Your peers are inventing and improving robots: What does Georgia Tech need to do to shape a future with robots?

We are already shaping a robotic future at Georgia Tech, but there is much to be done. Within the College of Design, in a great example of how robots can contribute to the arts and empowering those with disabilities, music Professor Gil Weinberg has developed a marimba-playing robotic musician that uses machine learning for jazz improvisation, as well as a prosthetic robotic arm for amputees that restores and enhances human drumming abilities. Associate Professor Russell Gentry offers a great example for architecture; he is using a Kuka robot for teaching robotic fabrication and for researching humans – robot collaboration in a fabrication setting.

4. What else should the Design academic community research about robots? 

We have a major research focus on assistive technologies involving several schools and research centers of the College of Design and robots will be an increasing part of such technologies. How robots navigate existing street, sidewalk and building infrastructure, and how their presence might influence future design of such infrastructure is another rich research area. And how the deployment of robots in multiple economic sectors affects current and future jobs will be a critical economic development question tying in with many aspects of the Design academic community.

Five College of Design instructors have won the 2016 Class of 1940 Course Survey Teaching Effectiveness Award. This award is given to a maximum of 40 Georgia Tech teachers who received the best scores on the Course-Instructor Opinion Survey for the question, "Overall, this instructor is an effective teacher".

The prize includes a one-time pre-tax award of $1000 and having their name printed in the Celebrating Teaching Day (March 14, 2017) program.

School of Architecture: Michael Gamble

Michael Gamble, an associate professor in the School of Architecture, won the award for instructing ARCH 6069: Advanced Architecture Design I. Gamble also won the award in 2015, 2013, and 2012. He is the director of graduate studies for the School of Architecture, creative director for Gamble + Gamble Architects in Atlanta, and known for examining the environmental impact of design decisions, notably through his work with housing, energy, and building technologies.

Gamble’s research has received grants from: The Alcoa Foundation, The Kendeda Foundation, Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development, and the National Endowments of the Arts. He also received First Prize for Research in an international competition sponsored by the Environmental Design and Research Association.

School of City & Regional Planning: Dan Immergluck

Dan Immergluck won the 2016 award for instructing CP 6630: Government and Housing Markets. He's won the award twice before, both for CP 6611 | Real Estate Finance and Development.

As a professor in the School of City & Regional Planning, Immergluck teaches courses in statistics, real estate finance, housing policy, and social justice and equity planning. Professor Immergluck’s research concerns affordable housing, neighborhood change, community development finance, economic development, and other topics. His applied research focuses on housing and development issues in Atlanta as well as cities around the country.

Dan is the author of four books, more than four dozen scholarly articles, numerous book chapters and encyclopedia entries, and scores of applied research reports. His scholarship is widely cited, and he has been quoted extensively in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, and other media. He has testified several times before Congress and the Federal Reserve Board.

School of Industrial Design: Young-Mi Choi

Young-Mi Choi, an associate professor in the School of Industrial Design, won the award for instructing ID 2022: ID Studio II. The class is set up to give students the chance to interact with a variety of users, such as users with spinal cord injuries confined to a wheelchair or users with visual impairments. This allows them to practice engagement techniques with real users, obtain feedback and test their designs.

Choi teaches product development, human factors, and ergonomics. Her research activities focus on applying evidence-based design in innovation and human-centered design. Her research focuses on topics related to the roles played by users, industrial designers, engineers, and marketers during the process of creating new products and assistive technologies. She is also the director of the I3 Lab and a project director with the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Wireless Inclusive Technologies (WIT RERC). She has received the National Science Foundation ADVANCE Program Women of Excellence Award, Outstanding Faculty Award and multiple course teaching effectiveness awards.

School of Industrial Design: Stephen Sprigle

Stephen Sprigle, a professor with appointments in Bioengineering, Industrial Design and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, won the award for instructing ID 6100 -- a required class for students in the Industrial Design and Human-Computer Interaction graduate programs.The class targets the science of design, professional ethics and responsible conduct of research. Students are challenged to think through the trade-offs between various design research methods, and discuss the history and profession of industrial design.

A biomedical engineer with a license in physical therapy, Sprigle directs the Rehabilitation Engineering and Applied Research Lab (REARLab), which focuses on applied disability research and development. The REARLab’s research interests include the biomechanics of wheelchair seating and posture, pressure ulcer prevention, and manual wheelchair propulsion. Its development activities include standardized wheelchair and cushion testing and the design of assistive and diagnostic technologies.

School of Music: Jason Freeman

Jason Freeman, a professor in the School of Music, won the award for instructing MUSI 6003: Music Technology: History and Repertoire. His artistic practice and scholarly research focus on using technology to engage diverse audiences in collaborative, experimental, and accessible musical experiences. He also develops educational interventions (such as EarSketch) in K-12, university, and MOOC environments that broaden and increase engagement in STEM disciplines through authentic integrations of music and computing. His music has been performed at Carnegie Hall, exhibited at ACM SIGGRAPH, published by Universal Edition, broadcast on public radio’s Performance Today, and commissioned through support from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Freeman’s wide-ranging work has attracted support from sources such as the National Science Foundation, Google, and Turbulence. He has published his research in leading conferences and journals such as Computer Music Journal, Organised Sound, NIME, and ACM SIGCSE. Freeman received his B.A. in music from Yale University and his M.A. and D.M.A. in composition from Columbia University.

His program, EarSketch, has already introduced coding to students in Gwinnett and Fulton counties in the Atlanta, Georgia region. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that 90,000 students have used EarSketch to date.

Developed in collaboration with Georgia Tech's Digital Media program and CEISMIC (Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics and Computing), EarSketch allows students to use code to create their own music. While that might sound like an unusual combination at first, Freeman told the AJC that it isn't as odd as it sounds.

“Music is something that has a connection to the real things students care about. It’s kind of a magical way to get them engaged, and that’s a huge challenge in STEAM education. But with EarSketch, they can interact with music through code, and they can do things they could never do with a traditional music platform. We’re able to create interactive applications that ask users about the kind of music they want - pop, gospel, hip hop and so on – using a library of about 4,000 sounds as a starting point. Students can even record their own sounds, too," he said in an interview.

Earsketch is a rapidly growing tool that is being used in Atlanta area schools, but has expanded to multiple states nationally and is now being used in other countries. It is free to use for anyone, and can be accessed at https://earsketch.gatech.edu.

Read more about it in the feature story.

It’s called TuneTable. Students move coasters along the table’s projection surface to make a musical piece using elements of computer programming.  Then they tap the surface to play a series of beats, beeps and samples. The table will be installed at the Museum of Design Atlanta in early 2017 and Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry in the summer.

The project addresses a national need to make major strides in computer programming literacy for K-12 students.

“It’s also about changing the attitude about computation and exposing it to people that might not have sought it out otherwise,” said project lead Brian Magerko, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. “Hopefully some of them will think it is a cool, new way to express themselves.”

The table includes basic computing programming elements that people would use when learning programming formally for the first time, such as iteration and go-to statements.

TuneTable’s interactive surface uses computer vision to detect printed markers — officially they’re called fiducials —  on the coasters. Each coaster is assigned a sound or programming command, such as a splitter or repeater. People link them together to form a chain of electronic and hip hop sounds.  

“Manipulating notes, chords and rests requires a lot of music theory knowledge,” said Magerko, who also leads Georgia Tech’s Adaptive Digital Media lab. “Instead, we’re opting to manipulate music samples with code. And certain genres, such as electronic and hip hop, map very well computationally.”

Magerko said they’re also very appealing to underserved populations, such as women, African-Americans and Latinos. He and Georgia Tech College of Design Professor Jason Freeman learned that after designing a software program called EarSketch that teaches Python and Javascript at nearly 200 high schools across the country. EarSketch students use digital audio workstations and the programming languages to manipulate loops and compose music. TuneTable reimagines this experience within a museum exhibit.  

“The table allows us bring the basics of computer programming out of the classroom and into more informal settings such as museums,” said Freeman, a co-principal investigator on the NSF grant. “Kids can be playful and social, just by walking up and giving it a try.”

Once the exhibit arrives in museums, people will be able to create their own music and email it to themselves. They can continue tinkering with the code when they get home using EarSketch or a tablet version of the software, which is being designed by Northwestern’s Mike Horn. 

“We see the tablet app as a crucial connection point between what kids experience at the museum with TuneTable and what they learn in school with EarSketch,” said Horn. “We want it to give kids space and time to build up foundational computational literacy skills before the deep dive into learning Python or JavaScript.”

The project is supported in part by NSF grant AISL-1612644. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors.

EarSketch teaches students core computational concepts and the Python and JavaScript languages. Using a digital audio workstation, students write code to create and remix music in popular styles such as hip hop and dubstep.

The software has been used by more than 75,000 students in all 50 states and more than 100 countries since launching in 2013. It is freely accessible to all teachers and students. Georgia Tech researchers created the program to address the national need to make major strides in computer programming literacy for K-12 students, especially among underserved populations.

“Students who study with EarSketch have been shown to make progress in both content knowledge and attitudes toward computer science,” said co-creator Jason Freeman, a professor of music in the College of Design. “EarSketch is especially effective at engaging female students in computing, whose gains in computing engagement in our research can be two or three times higher than their male peers.”

EarSketch will train 50 K-12 teachers in computer science principles this summer through in-person workshops and online training.

Freeman co-directs EarSketch with Brian Magerko, an associate professor in the Ivan Allen College School of Literature, Media, and Communication, in collaboration with Georgia Tech’s Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC) and the Institute for Computing Education. EarSketch is supported by the National Science Foundation, Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, Scott Hudgens Family Foundation and Google.

This morning’s White House fact sheet kicks off CSEdWeek and highlights new actions of support for computer science education. President Barack Obama challenged the nation to create opportunities for every child to learn computer science during February’s State of the Union Address.

AMAC Accessibility Solutions and Research Center this year marks 10 years of providing products and services to those with disabilities.

Also this year, the Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access (CATEA) moved from its location in a church on 10th Street to join AMAC in the same building on Means Street.

Being in the same building led the two Centers this year to create the Centers for Inclusive Design Innovation, which has already received funding for a project.

The Centers want to mark these milestones at an open house Thursday at their offices at 512 Means St., from 4-7 p.m.

Visitors will have the opportunity to tour their space, see demonstrations, such as AMAC’s braille machines used for tactile printing, and their student disability accommodation software.

CATEA will show various posters and demonstrations from current and past research projects. That includes the posters submitted to the TechSAge Design Competition for the GatePal app featured on the College of Design, and the TechSAge ALIGN app, which was mentioned in Atlanta Magazine and nominated for a Groundbreaker Award.

Transforming Accessibility in the College of Design

Although the approaches of the two Centers are different, they both use technology to assist people with disabilities and those aging with limitations.

Focused on helping students with disabilities, AMAC first offered services in 2006 at the University of Georgia. The Center moved to the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2010. Center Director Christopher Lee, along with Noel Gregg and other colleagues at UGA, were the inspiration behind AMAC. Gregg worked with AMAC for a few years and has since retired.

Today AMAC has more than 50 staff members who serve 800 member institutions and hundreds more who use their services on an as-needed basis. Not bad for a Center that started with 14 members serving 100 universities.

During the past 10 years, AMAC faced challenges, “including reducing the high cost of accommodations … and integrating a business model that would leverage existing business partners,” Lee said in a statement.

AMAC overcame these challenges and Lee transformed the Center into “an international research and development organization focused on inclusive design in corporate offices, government organizations and nonprofit environments,” he said.

One of AMAC’s biggest grants is the First in The World Grant from the U.S. Department of Education which funds the research of the Center for Accessible Materials Innovation (CAMI). The multi-million-dollar grant will help the center study the graduation gap between students with disabilities and their peers without.

CATEA started as the Center for Rehabilitation Technology (CRT) in 1980, and became the Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access in 1999.

CATEA’s focus today is on resources to help employers make accommodations decisions, promote accessible STEM education, and resources to promote health and wellness among seniors while also serving their accessibility needs.

In the past dozen years, CATEA had three national Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers funded by the federal government’s National Institute on Independent Living, Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR).

These are the largest ($4.5-$4.75 million over 5 years) and most prestigious awards made by NIDILRR, and funded CATEA projects: “Workplace Accommodations” (2003-2013), “Wheeled Mobility” (2004-2016), and currently “TechSAge” (2013-2018). Current funding also includes a $2.5 million, 5-year study to demonstrate that universal design is a more effective strategy than ADA-required workplace accommodations to engage workers with disabilities.

According to CATEA Director Jon Sanford, by dollar amount, AMAC and CATEA account for about 70 percent of the outside funding in the College, with CATEA as the second largest research center in the College of Design.

Building Georgia Tech’s Accessibility Legacy

The move to create the Centers for Inclusive Design Innovation (CIDI), gives AMAC and CATEA, the two largest centers in the College, the opportunity to collaborate on a larger level, Sanford said.

“CATEA has expertise in research, particularly related to technology and the environment. AMAC has expertise in training and service provision, particularly related to information technology and assistive technology. These complementary programs can strengthen each other,” he noted.

“For example, the new Assistive Software Knowledgebase project was actually awarded to CIDI, and will use the expertise of both CATEA and AMAC.

“CIDI provides an umbrella to show one face to the outside world without losing the identities and name recognition of either center,” Sanford said.

View video here.

Georgia Tech is no longer accepting submissions to the 2012 Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition. Finalists will be invited to Atlanta February 16-17, 2012, where contestants will compete for $10,000 in cash prizes.

“The Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition is a platform for bringing like-minded inventors and composers together from all over the world to develop their ideas and careers,” said Gil Weinberg, director of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology. “We encourage anyone with a great idea that pushes the envelope in musical expression to enter.”

An annual event to find the world’s best new ideas in musicality, design and engineering, Wired magazine has called the competition an “X-Prize for music,” and contestants have likened it to a TED Conference for new musical instrument designers.

This year, winners will be selected by an expert jury panel that will include Atau Tanaka, media artist and researcher, and Cyril Lance, chief engineer at electronic musical instrument manufacturer Moog Music.

In addition to Best in Show prize and Best Student Submission award, prizes will be given for entries in five categories. See examples from past competitions on the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology YouTube channel. The categories are:

Mobile: musical instruments that take advantage of the unique interface elements and extreme portability of either standard smartphone platforms or custom-made hardware devices to revolutionize how and where music is made. See an example from past competitions.

Robotics: mechanical devices that play an existing acoustic instrument or contain such an instrument within their design, facilitating the performance of novel music and/or creating novel collaborations with other musicians while they demonstrate the potential for musicianship in the robotic realm. See an example from past competitions.

Repurposed: musical instruments that are inspired by existing non-musical objects, building upon their design to show the latent musicality we regularly encounter but might not otherwise notice. See an example from past competitions.

Augmented: musical instruments inspired by existing acoustic instruments, building upon their existing design, playing technique and performance practice with new elements that extend their expressive capabilities. See an example from past competitions.

Controllers: novel hardware interfaces that can be readily connected to other software or hardware via a standard protocol, immediately expanding the expressive performance capabilities of anything with which they are linked. See an example from past competitions.