Programming by Playing and Approaches for Expressive Robot Performances

“It’s not what you play, but how you play it”. The term “robotic performance” has traditionally been used to describe a musical performance that lacks expression and evokes no emotion from listeners. Indeed, current instrumentplaying robots have achieved high technical proficiency, but “perfect” performances of a piece are not necessarily considered musical. In this paper, we propose a Programming by Playing approach which gives musical expression to robot performances. We further examine precisely what makes music robots play more or less “robotically”, and survey the field of musical expression in search of a good model to make robots play more like humans.