Hi Friend,

On this week's Inner Circle Podcast episode, Georgia Tech's Gil Weinberg joins me to show how robots, prosthetics, and AI can expand what musicians do.

Gil built Shimon, a marimba robot with eight arms capable of 20 hits per second, and a prosthetic drum arm for amputee Jason Barnes that uses ultrasound sensing to give him finger-by-finger piano control.

His Hear Me app blocks text prompts entirely and requires users to play, sing, or sequence into it before any AI generation begins. The throughline across all of it is that the act of playing stays with the musician.

Gil founded the Center for Music Technology at Georgia Tech in 2009, six years after joining the faculty in 2003.

The Center spans music information retrieval, machine learning, spatial audio, robotic musicianship, and new instrument design, with graduates going on to work at Dolby, Bose, Google, and Apple.

It also presents the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, where musical instrument inventors show their latest ideas, which we cover during the show.

Gil's clearest design principle is that friction in music creation is a feature, not a problem to eliminate, because the struggle of learning an instrument builds cognitive and social capacities that a generated audio file cannot replicate.

That same refusal to accept the easiest output is exactly what Hear Me enforces: you must play first, and the AI responds to you.

You can hear it at bobbyoinnercircle.com, or via Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Mixcloud, Spotify, Deezer, and TuneIn Radio.

Also, a video version of this podcast is now available on YouTube as well.

Enjoy the show!

Bobby

P.S. Mixing, production, music business . . . if you want to learn it, I've probably got a course for it. See for yourself at bobbyowsinskicourses.com.