FROM DIGITAL TO "REAL LIFE"?

I was gobsmacked to run across an online ad for the cutest ever toy - a realistic faux-fur covered mini-bunny. Here's what it said:

"Pubyfun™ BunnyPal was designed by renowned child development expert Dr. Lucas Reed to help children break free from the influence of the digital world and reconnect with real-life interactions and exploration."

No. This is NOT real life, in case anyone did not notice.

This is robotics. This is A.I. This is something. This is something I am not in favor of.

At least one of those rabbit-related, cute little furry doggies admits it is a robot. There's an even more "realistic" doggie that keeps popping up on my cell phone on a daily basis, in case you might have noticed that, too? I think it might be the Topinin one and you, too, can have one for about $45.

What do furry robots have to do with music?

A while ago I found a robot conductor photographed in 2023. It was crudely simulating a human form and conducting a South Korean orchestra. I thought it was the first such ever in the advent of the world, and I blogged about it (against it?), but I was wrong.

I just learned that I missed the real first-ever such robot conductor in 2008 at the Detroit Symphony. It is shown conducting in a news report from last October, 2024, which then featured the apparently latest direction of robotic conducting design.

German engineers have now managed after two developmental years, and proudly so, to disembody the previously humanoid form into three separate arms standing apart from each other in front of the musicians and waving their "arms" spasmodically. It's beyond eerie.

Not only that, but the same 2024 news report proved that I had missed a two-arm-headless wonder from 2017 that conducted an orchestra in Pisa, Italy. Ah, those fashion - and robot -forward musical Italian designers...

Robotics or A.I., I'm still opposed in the field of the arts. It's the same as I felt fifteen or more years ago when computer-generated "calligraphy" took over and wiped out my side business at the time. Calligraphy is perhaps my favorite fine art because it is a neat and tidy art -- until one spills the bottle of ink! I always locked my kitties out of the production room when I had a professional art piece to create.

Frankly, I'd like to lock robot conductors out of the concert hall permanently...although I'm not a lost cause. Truth be told I do like a few technological advances when it comes to music.

I rather like those fab loopers that can accompany a single musician and enable a certain complexity and breadth to their solo musical creation. Scroll down on this blog and hear Michelle Walther make music with her violin and a looper. She's a Swiss violinist, vocalist, and composer active in the Bay Area GROUPMUSE musical initiative to promote intimate, home and small-venue based concerts.

Meantime, I'll keep a baleful eye on the development of robot conductors, hoping never to see real live breathing human beings disappear from the front of the stage...at least not until we get 50% of those real live human beings being of the female kind, or perhaps even as a fair start some 200 years of only real live female conductors? (Note what Ruth Bader Ginsberg so wisely said in the blog cited immediately above.)

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