An overview of MechBass: A four string robotic bass guitar

McVay, James; Carnegie, Dale A.; Murphy, Jim W.

doi:10.1109/icara.2015.7081144

Cited by 11 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 2 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This picking mechanism from the single string Bass-Bot was incorporated in the highly successful MechBass (Fig. 3) -a four-string mechatronic bass guitar that has nearly 750,000 views on YouTube [16]. Similar to BassBot, MechBass employs a NEMA-17 stepper motor onto which is mounted a 3D printed wheel with five picks clamped using laser cut acrylic (Fig.…”

Section: Picker-pluckermentioning

confidence: 99%

Designing Mechatronic Musical Instruments: The Guitar

2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Since the earliest times, humans have sought the ability to produce rhythms and tones using devices external to the human body. As technology developed, so too did the desire for this sound production to become automated. Initially peaking around the Industrial Revolution, traditional automated musical production devices went into a steep decline with the arrival of the phonograph. However, factors such as the ubiquitous acceptance of the microcontroller led to a resurgent interest in this field. This paper investigates the design considerations and development of the stringed chordophone and specifically the guitar. The challenge is to produce a mechatronic device capable of speedy and reliable note selection, string actuation, string damping and expressiveness. In the same manner that there is not one best way to play a guitar and no best guitar design, so too is there no ''best'' chordophone design. Rather, the competing factors of speed, precision, reliability, portability, expressiveness and timbral variation can be given different weightings and result in different designs. Therefore, rather than presenting a single chordophone development, this paper provides a multitude of design options providing an interested reader with the background and suggestions to create their own bespoke design. This paper concludes with the presentation of the authors' final design as an integration of the presented ideas and design techniques. We demonstrate that this chordophone introduces expressivity at a level not achieved before, is modular yet portable, is mechanically quiet and can play at a speed beyond that of even the best human player. INDEX TERMS Automated music production, mechatronic chordophone, mechatronic music.

show abstract

Section: Picker-pluckermentioning

confidence: 99%

Designing Mechatronic Musical Instruments: The Guitar

2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…To date, different types of robot musicians have been developed [22]. Several studies have developed robotic guitars and basses, such as the LEMUR GuitarBot [23], and MechBass [24], a four-string robotic bass guitar. Another example is Strumbot [25], a standalone six-stringed robotic guitar.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Guitar Chord Sensing and Recognition Using Multi-Task Learning and Physical Data Augmentation with Robotics

Byambatsogt

Choimaa

Koutaki

2020

Sensors

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In recent years, many researchers have shown increasing interest in music information retrieval (MIR) applications, with automatic chord recognition being one of the popular tasks. Many studies have achieved/demonstrated considerable improvement using deep learning based models in automatic chord recognition problems. However, most of the existing models have focused on simple chord recognition, which classifies the root note with the major, minor, and seventh chords. Furthermore, in learning-based recognition, it is critical to collect high-quality and large amounts of training data to achieve the desired performance. In this paper, we present a multi-task learning (MTL) model for a guitar chord recognition task, where the model is trained using a relatively large-vocabulary guitar chord dataset. To solve data scarcity issues, a physical data augmentation method that directly records the chord dataset from a robotic performer is employed. Deep learning based MTL is proposed to improve the performance of automatic chord recognition with the proposed physical data augmentation dataset. The proposed MTL model is compared with four baseline models and its corresponding single-task learning model using two types of datasets, including a human dataset and a human combined with the augmented dataset. The proposed methods outperform the baseline models, and the results show that most scores of the proposed multi-task learning model are better than those of the corresponding single-task learning model. The experimental results demonstrate that physical data augmentation is an effective method for increasing the dataset size for guitar chord recognition tasks.

show abstract

“…Vindriis, McVay and colleagues discuss approaches to an automated bass guitar design, the 'Bassbot', later the 'Mech-Bass' (Vindriis andCarnegie, 2011) (McVay et al, 2011). Vindriis and Carnegie analyse three methods of string plucking using either stepper motor 'pick wheels' or linear solenoid actuators.…”

Section: Robotic Stringed Instrumentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adapting the Bass Guitar for One-Handed Playing

Harrison

McPherson

2017

Journal of New Music Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper presents a prototype system for adapting the bass guitar for one-handed musicians. We discuss existing solutions to accessible musical instruments, followed by the results of an online survey of bass guitarists, which informed the design of a prototype bass guitar adaptation. The adaptation comprises a foot-operated MIDI controller with a solenoid-actuated fretting mechanism, providing access to six frets across two strings of the bass. A study involving six bassists rehearsing and writing a bass guitar accompaniment with the adapted bass highlighted unexpected facets of bass guitar playing, and provided insights into the design of future accessible string instruments.

show abstract

An overview of MechBass: A four string robotic bass guitar

Cited by 11 publications

References 2 publications

Designing Mechatronic Musical Instruments: The Guitar

Designing Mechatronic Musical Instruments: The Guitar

Guitar Chord Sensing and Recognition Using Multi-Task Learning and Physical Data Augmentation with Robotics

Adapting the Bass Guitar for One-Handed Playing

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About