Where are we with robot solo musicians ?

If you care about music: at least 100 years, almost certainly much longer. I don't think any of us in this comment section will live to see an AI that truly understands human music.

If you care about money and don't mind making the world a more terrible place: humiliate a few dozen human classical pianists by making them record hundreds of hours of motion capture, invest in engineering a good robo-arm, and I would guess in 5 years you'd have something passable.

I would think self play and record would be enough to iterate. chess engines don’t really need any human games any more and can learn from self play from scratch. I don’t see why music would be different.

Games are "easy" for reinforcement learning because they have win conditions that can be automatically evaluated. Music isn't really like that.

record players are perfect

robot lips are pretty poor. They exist, but not at the point of making brass/wind instruments practical.

most other things can be operated adequately by robots.

But then, you're better off with either synthesisers or direct genAI synthesis.

However I do wonder what the point of offloading the distillation of human emotion to robots is. The whole point of music is that it contains what someone _feels_.

Some new Steinway pianos have a 'high resolution player piano' feature where the performances of concert pianists can be played back on your Steinway. Not really a robot soloist, but I thought it was interesting. Not interesting enough that if I suddenly came into Steinway money I'd get one with that feature, though.

I am skeptical to a robot's ability to interpret a piece of music from say Gershwin, Bernstein, Mozart or Beethoven. The beauty of human musicians is that each high level musician my have his own approach to a given piece of music. It is not just about the scores written but to interpret what the composer might have thought or felt. A robot playing these pieces might send the a.m. composers spinning in their graves.