Automaton

Photo: Takanishi Lab

Toyota's Partner plays the violin and trumpet, and Honda's Asimo has even conducted the Detroit Symphony.

Atsuo Takanishi wants to build an entire humanoid robot orchestra. Takanishi, a professor of mechanical engineering at Waseda University, in Tokyo, started with a flutist.

From John Boyd's "This Robot Toots Its Own Flute" story in Spectrum:

Getting the robot to produce a melody turned out to be a monumental task. First, the researchers worked with professional players to create a performance index of what constitutes the best flute sounds. They translated these sounds into mathematical formulations, to which the robot refers. The researchers then programmed the robot’s organs to create a sound. Once a sound was produced, they used the parameters controlling the organs that produced the sound as a base and then adjusted those parameters repeatedly until the sound improved and eventually approximated a target sound in the performance index.