Robots Playing Synths Way Back in 1984

1984 was an eventful year for geekdom. That was when Apple released the Macintosh, people breathed a collective sigh of relief over George Orwell’s predictions failing to pass, and The Terminator debuted, bringing the concept of machines taking over mankind to contemporary mainstream consciousness.

1984 was also the year when Japan’s Waseda University developed the WABOT-2, an “intelligent humanoid keyboard player”. As SynthGear reports:

When it was made, it was considered the ‘most advanced robot of its time’ – it could speak Japanese, and it could play a song on a synthesizer, using both hands and feet, while reading the sheet music with it’s single ‘eye’. It could also listen to a person’s singing voice, adjust its tempo to match, identify the notes and come up with a live accompaniment based on the sung melody. Oh, and it could carry on a basic conversation too.

Seems like the Japanese were already unwittingly contributing to the robotic apocalypse as far back as the mid-80s. SynthGear tries to be cute, warning readers not to anger WABOT-2, as “he’s liable to rip your arms off”. But what’s the joke there? With more powerful limbs, it’s easy to assume that future variants of the WABOT will put the best keyboard players to shame—and have enough power to indeed separate human appendages from their unwilling host torsos. Looks like the time frame of the WABOT-2 and The Terminator is more than a coincidence.

Video of the WABOT-2 playing (and secretly contributing to the robotic master plan for human downfall) below: