• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.2378-2387
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• 2017

Violinists learn to make better sounds by hearing and evaluating their own playing though numerous practice. This study proposes a new method of auditory feedback, which mimics this violinists' step and verifies its efficiency using experiments. Making the desired sound quality of a violin is difficult without auditory feedback even though an expert violinist plays. An algorithm for controlling a robot arm of violin playing robot is determined based on correlations with bowing speed, bowing force, and sound point that determine the sound quality of a violin. The bowing speed is estimated by the control command of the robot arm, where the bowing force and the sound point are recognized by using a two-axis load cell and a photo interrupter, respectively. To improve the sound quality of a violin playing robot, the sounds information is obtained by auditory feedback system applied Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT) to the sounds from a violin. This study suggests Gaussian-Harmonic-Quality (GHQ) uses sounds' clarity, accuracy, and harmonic structure in order to decide sound quality, objectively. Through the experiments, the auditory feedback system improved the performance quality by the robot accordingly, changing the bowing speed, bowing force, and sound point and determining the quality of robot sounds by GHQ sound quality evaluation system.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.38 no.6
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• pp.1218-1228
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• 2016

This paper proposes a robot hand for a violin-playing robot and introduces a newly developed robot finger. The proposed robot hand acts as the left hand of the violin-playing robot system. The violin fingering plays an important role in determining the tone or sound when the violin is being played. Among the diverse types of violin fingering playing, it is not possible to produce vibrato with simple position control. Therefore, we newly designed a three-axis load cell for force control, which is mounted at the end of the robot finger. Noise is calculated through an analysis of the resistance difference across the strain gauge attached to the proposed three-axis load cell. In order to ensure the stability of the three-axis load cell by analyzing the stress distribution, the strain generated in the load cell is also verified through a finite element analysis. A sound rating quality system previously developed by the authors is used to compare and analyze the sound quality of the fourth-octave C-note played by a human violinist and the proposed robot finger.