Volume Control by Adjusting Wrist Moment of Violin-Playing Robot

Abstract

This paper introduces the details of the anthropomorphic violin-playing robot built in the authors' laboratory and an algorithm for controlling the sound volume by adjusting its wrist moment. Investigating the relationship between such sound parameters as sound volume and human impressions is an important research field in Kansei Engineering, which is a growing research field in Japan. They focused on the violin and built a violin-playing robot with two 7 DOF arms for bowing and fingering. Then they constructed an algorithm to adjust the wrist moment to control the sound volume. Based on the result of the experiments, the authors concluded that the moment-based algorithm works well to successfully control the sound volume. Finally, they analyzed the sound spectrum of the produced sounds of different wrist moment, and concluded that there is a possibility for the controlling sound spectrum, which affects human impressions.