Richard Savery

Emotional Musical Prosody

Using Musical Prosody for Robotic Interaction

About:

My work with Emotional Musical Prosody started with the broad question of what voice a robot should use to communicate. I focused on generating a new non-speech voice, aiming to avoid uncanny valley, and allow a robot to talk like a robot. This was done using prosodic audio generated through deep learning on an embedded Nvidia Jetson TX2. After creating the voice I was able to show increased levels of trust in users when collaborating with Shimi. These metrics then led to the development of a successful NSF grant with my advisor Gil Weinberg, which commenced in November 2019.

After being awarded the NSF grant, the main portion of my PhD reserach focused on expanding Emotional Musical Prosody to robotic arms and groups of robots, eventually becoming my dissertation: Machine Learning Driven Emotional Musical Prosody for Human-Robot Interaction

Grants

National Science Foundation, National Robotics Initiative - $803,892.00

In 2019 I was the primary author with my advisor Gil Weinberg for an NSF grant Creating Trust Between Groups of Humans and Robots Using a Novel Music Driven Robotic Emotion Generator

Press:

Shimi Will Now Sing to You in an Adorable Robot Voice IEEE Spectrum - 05 Mar 2019

Publications:

Machine Learning Driven Emotional Musical Prosody for Human-Robot Interaction

Georgia Tech, PhD Dissertation

Committee:

  • Dr Gil Weinberg (Advisor)
  • Dr Claire Arthur
  • Dr Jason Freeman
  • Dr Ayanna Howard

Emotional musical prosody for the enhancement of trust: Audio design for robotic arm communication

Richard Savery, Lisa Zahray, Gil Weinberg

Paladyn, Journal of Behavioral Robotics

Before, Between, and After: Enriching Robot Communication Surrounding Collaborative Creative Activities

Richard Savery, Lisa Zahray, Gil Weinberg

Frontiers in Robotics and AI: Creativity and Robotics, 2021

Machine Learning Driven Musical Improvisation for Mechanomorphic Human-Robot Interaction

Richard Savery

ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 2021

Emotion Musical Prosody for Robotic Groups and Entitativity

Richard Savery, Amit Rogel and Gil Weinberg,

30th IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication, 2021

Musical Prosody-Driven Emotion Classification: Interpreting Vocalists Portrayal of Emotions Through Machine Learning

Nic Farris, Brian Model, Richard Savery, Gil Weinberg,

18th Sound and Music Computing Conference, 2021

Emotional Musical Prosody for the Enhancement of Trust in Robotic Arm Communication

Richard Savery, Lisa Zahray, Gil Weinberg

Trust, Acceptance and Social Cues in Human-Robot Interaction, Ro-MAN 2020

Emotional Musical Prosody: Validated Vocal Dataset for Human Robot Interaction

Richard Savery, Lisa Zahray, Gil Weinberg

2020 Joint Conference on AI Music Creativity

Establishing Human-Robot Trust through Music-Driven Robotic Emotion Prosody and Gesture

28th IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication 2019

Richard Savery, Ryan Rose and Gil Weinberg

Finding Shimi’s Voice: Fostering Human-Robot Communication With Music And a NVIDIA Jetson TX2

Linux Audio Conference 2019

R Savery, R Rose, G Weinberg