BBC News Online: In Depth: Sci Tech: 2002: Boston 2002
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Friday, 15 February, 2002, 17:05 GMT
The rockin' robot
Humans and machine search for the perfect beat
By Pallab Ghosh in Boston
Science correspondent
It's three in the morning at an impromptu rave and the DJ is on fire
and he hasn't even had a drink yet. But this MC doesn't need one;
he's a box of tricks - a computer spinning vinyl to the beats
randomly accessed from its memory.
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" We went up against a DJ who schooled us proper "
Chris Csikszentmihalyi
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The DJ-I, Robot Sound System, has come out of the Media Lab at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is part of a project that
aims to explore the impact new media are having on modern culture.
It also seems to be about having a bit of a laugh. Chris
Csikszentmihalyi, Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at
the Media Lab, cannot resist poking a little fun at human DJs who
take the project far too seriously and feel their midnight hour is
about to be taken away.
"We're trying to make human DJs obsolete as far as possible," he
chuckles. "They're expensive, they're unreliable. If we can make this
machine work we'll give club owners an easy time."
Still to learn
The reality - before any DJs reading this page fall off their
turntables - is that DJ-I has some way to go before it can out funk
the living thing.
"We had a concert about eight months ago in Brooklyn," remembers Chris.
"It was one of these underground warehouse parties. We went up
against a DJ who schooled us proper.
"It was pretty sad. We've had quite a few competitions which we
inevitably use, but it two years, four months and two weeks - we'll
be better."
The machine uses a PC, several micro-controllers, and an advanced
"motion control" system to automatically mix, scratch, and search the
vinyl records sitting on its turntables.
"The PC can tell the system to go anywhere in the records, from the
very first snare beat to the very last snare beat at about 300 RPM,"
says Chris Csikszentmihalyi .
New sounds
"It is a human-machine hybrid. When we started the competitions, we
didn't have very good scratching. Now we have.
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" We plan to go out and record the motions of famous DJs for posterity "
Chris Csikszentmihalyi, Media Lab, MIT
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"We essentially built a motion-capture system that hooks up to a
regular DJ's turntable that allows us to capture whatever sorts of
scratches or motions that they do. We can then save that to file and
even manipulate them.
"We plan to go out and record the motions of famous DJs for
posterity. We'll then be able to combine their signatures - to make
the perfect DJ."
The results are impressive and sound - certainly to the uninitiated -
just as though real fingers are on the platters.
And Chris Csikszentmihalyi says the more enlightened among the human
DJ community have seen the sound system as way to develop new ideas.
When DJs come into the lab to play around with the machine, they
sometimes hear sounds they have never heard before.
Chris says the DJs go away and practise the sounds so they can use
them in their own sets.
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Related to this story:
Scientists invent electronic DJ (16 Nov 01 | England)
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Internet links: AAAS | DJ-I, Robot Sound System | British Association
for the Advancement of Science |
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