Musical robot Shimon to release an album he completely played and sang on

Georgia Tech’s Center for Music Technology has made a robot that's able to compose, play, and sing completely original songs. Shimon, the marimba-playing robot will release an album on Spotify next month featuring songs written (and sung) entirely by him, IEEE Spectrum reports. The plan was for the robot to go on tour as well; which it as well might, if it's exclusively robots in the audience, not just on stage. When Shimon started learning music, he got a huge database of music composed by humans - a dataset of 50,000 lyrics from jazz, prog rock, and hip-hop, but the key to Shimon’s composing ability is its semantic knowledge - the ability to make thematic connections between things, which is a step beyond just throwing some deep learning.