A Novel Violin Playing Robot for South Indian Classical Music

For the past few decades, robotics researchers have focused on Western music with only a handful of attempts to address music from other parts of the world such as South Indian Classical music (a.k.a. Carnatic music) - a music form popular in the southern part of India. In this work, we developed a Carnatic violin playing robot called Hathaani that uses pitch data to manipulate the left hand and amplitude data to make bow changes and modify dynamics. This work bears promise to revolutionize productions in Carnatic music by providing solutions to support gamakas - pitch based embellishments that are at the core of this music form. It can also have a significant contribution to education, by introducing a violin playing robot that can help students understand the nuances of gamaka playing in a repeated and systematic manner. A violin-playing robot can provide a much more accurate and expressive rendition of this music in comparison to software-based emulations.