Some guitar playing machine

From Slashdot:[0]spackbace writes "Researchers at the [1]Georgia Institute of Technology have created a mechanical guitar playing robot, named the [2]Crazy J. The guitar player is composed of two mechanical systems that interact to play a range of 29 musical notes. A plucking mechanism with six independently controlled picks is mounted over the body of the guitar and a fingering mechanism with an array of 23 fingertips is mounted over the first four frets of the fingerboard."
Links: 0. http://www.brianculler.com/ 1. http://www.gatech.edu/ 2. http://www.me.gatech.edu/mechatronics_lab/Projects/Fall00/group3/contents.htm
and some guy said that music played by a machine always sounds better because it has no mistakes...
Here's what I posted:
"If you knew something about music, you should know that a whole note does not last the same as two half notes, but a bit less. The moment of the attack is what defines the name of the note. For instance, a whole note may be very short, if it has a dot under it (piano), or it may last a lot longer, if the pedal is pressed.
Anyway, music played by machines will always sound like machines, because (among other things) machines don't have: feed-back (the ability to listen to what they play and react to it).A guitarist is always surprised and emotionally afected by the sound of what he plays, and that changes his playing and that is what makes the music express something, and that is what ultimately makes us enjoy listening to music. Otherwise I wouldn't call it music (of course there is a lot of this non-expressive sheet around, just listen to radios and TVs, but I don't call it music...)"
It is possible to listen to some samples in the referred site. Judge for yourself...
Or you can listen to mobile rings of mozart or beethoven tunes. The point is not wether "it's nice" or "it sounds OK". Is your music concept so large that it includes all this aberrations?
Bach is quoted for the following sentence, according to some he would say to his students:
just play the right note at the right time
But this should be understood under the right context:As for "the right note" it is quite obvious;
for "the right time": very often when trying to play some instrument, we tend to slow the dificult parts and run on the easier ones. Everybody that ever tried to play some instrument knows this (it's just like typing, some words are very fast...). So it is a very good exercise to play with metronome.
Another big mistake, also in well known concertists, is over interpretation. Most musics don't need that huge time/volume distortions most classic players do. And what's more surprising, most of them is not intentional, they don't know why they do it, and there is no explanation for it. So they don'tmake music sound better.
Lucky for them, we have such a good music legacy, that it is able to survive to all that distortions and pseudo-interpretations, and also to music playing machines.