A Multi-String Traversing Violin-Playing Robot for Carnatic Music
Raghavasimhan Sankaranarayanan, Gil Weinberg
AI summary
Problem
Robotic musicianship research is heavily Western-centric and lacks tools to accurately reproduce the continuous pitch ornamentations (gamakas) fundamental to South Indian Carnatic music. Existing software emulations fail to capture the acoustic nuances and physical constraints of real violin performance.
Approach
The authors developed Hathaani v2, a physical robot that translates monophonic audio into precise left-hand finger placements and dynamic bowing parameters, enabling continuous pitch modulation across all four violin strings.
Key results
- Novel differential bowing mechanism enabling real-time pressure and angle modulation
- Audio-driven trajectory generation algorithm for continuous pitch and string crossing
- Expert evaluation scores exceeding 4/5 on intonation, timbre, and gamaka authenticity
- Outperforms previous robotic baseline across all evaluated musical parameters
Why it matters
Provides a physically accurate, expressive platform for preserving, teaching, and performing Carnatic music, bridging a cultural gap in robotic musicianship research.
Abstract
Over the past several decades, robotic musician- ship researchers have mainly focused on Western music with only limited efforts addressing musical styles from other re- gions, 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 present Hathaani v2, a robotic system capable of performing Carnatic music on the violin. The robot is designed to translate pitch information into left-hand finger placement and amplitude information into bowing changes and dynamics, based on any monophonic audio recording. The left-hand mech- anism is capable of reaching arbitrary finger positions along the strings, allowing the robot to play gamakas - continuous pitch ornamentations that are fundamental to Carnatic music. The differential bowing mechanism provides both pressure and angle modulation, while maintaining mechanical rigidity and allowing visual engagement for the audience. We assessed the system’s ability to perform Carnatic music through expert listening studies involving ten professional musicians on into- nation, timbre, quality of bowing, hand coordination, gamaka authenticity, and clarity. The proposed robot outperforms the baseline on all of the evaluated parameters, achieving average scores exceeding 4 on a 5-point Likert scale (0.5 increments). This work has the potential to transform education and pro- duction of Carnatic music by offering programmatic solutions that support complex gamakas. Compared to software-based emulations, this physical violin-playing robot offers an accurate and expressive medium for conveying the nuances of Carnatic music performance.