Robots can play the cello with an orchestra now, and that sound you can hear is the point whistling over the top of its creator's heads

pcgamer.com:

I would describe myself as many things. Writer, long-haired moron, the most spectacular lover this side of the Milky Way. But one term I would also use to describe myself is: A musician. Not a spectacularly good one, I have to say, but I've been known to take a stringed instrument and throttle it to within an inch of its life for paying punters, and for my own enjoyment, too.

Which is why, when I found myself watching footage of a pair of robot arms playing the cello with the Malmö Symphony Orchestra, I felt a range of competing emotions. On the one hand, it's an impressive technical achievement, and one to be admired. On the other, I looked into the faces of the orchestra members sitting behind it, watching their beloved art form reduced down to a sequence of quite literally robotic motions, and felt a pang of existential dread and sympathy rolled into one.

Technically, it's a competent performance. One arm making smooth bow motions, the other wielding a circular appendage that manipulates the fingerboard to approximate the fingers of a skilled player. The pitch is on point, the timing immaculate.

The performance? Soulless, as you might expect. Because even at a professional orchestral level, what audiences pay to hear is a human being, feeling these notes as they play. The point of an instrument is to be used, as a tool, to convey the feelings, thoughts, and inner workings of one human to the minds, thoughts, and dare I even say it, souls, of the other human beings listening to it.

That's not what's here. Partly, there are some technical limitations to blame. That circular fretting appendage doesn't appear to be capable of vibrato, so there's no manipulation of the notes to add character and depth, a subtle shaking of the wrist or adjustment of finger tension to add character to the part.

All good string players know that it's not so much what you play as how you play it, and this collection of robotic limbs is doing it's darndest to play everything spot down the