Tag Archives: waltz

Strauss’s “Brudanow” Waltz Soars into Space to Celebrate His 200th Birthday

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Cape Canaveral, Florida – This month, Strauss’ Brudenau will embark on a journey into space. Discover the origins of King Waltz.

Timeless compositions will shine across the cosmos through a performance by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. The celestial event, titled Heavenly Saying, is set for May 31 and will be broadcasted via free public screenings in Vienna, Madrid, and New York, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the European Space Agency.

ESA staff have noted that music can be transmitted as radio signals in real-time; however, to circumvent potential technical difficulties, a pre-recorded version from the orchestra’s rehearsal will be aired the day before, with the live performance accompanying it.

Radio signals travel at the speed of light, approximately 670 million miles per hour (over 1 billion kilometers per hour).

As a result, the music would reach the Moon in just an hour and a half, Mars in 4.5 minutes, Jupiter in 37 minutes, and Neptune in 4 hours. Within a day, the signal would be over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away, as far as NASA’s Voyager 1, the most distant human-made object in interstellar space.

In 2008, NASA also commemorated 50 years by sending The Beatles’ “Across the Universe” into Deep Space. Furthermore, last year, they transmitted Missy Elliott’s “The Rain (Supa dupa Fly)” to Venus.

Music is not only traveling through space; NASA’s Mars Rover has made waves back to Earth. In 2012, flight controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California sent a recording of Will.i.am’s “Reach for the Stars,” which was then broadcasted by the Rover.

This interstellar transmission adds to a legacy of melodies shared between NASA mission control and astronauts since the mid-1960s.

Now it is Strauss’ turn, following its earlier inclusion in the Voyager Golden Records almost fifty years ago.

Released in 1977, NASA’s twin Voyager spacecraft each carry gold-plated copper gramophone records, equipped with styluses and instructions for playback.

These records feature earthly sounds and images alongside 90 minutes of music, curated by the late astronomer Carl Sagan and his committee, which included works by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Stravinsky, among contemporary and indigenous artists.

Notably omitted was Johann Strauss II, whose “Blue Danube” famously accompanied Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi film “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

The Vienna Tourism Board, located where Strauss was born on October 25, 1825, aims to rectify this “cosmic oversight” by sending the world’s most renowned waltz into the stars.

ESA’s large radio antenna in Spain, part of the agency’s deep space network, honors this initiative. The dish is directed toward Voyager 1, allowing “Blue Danube” to resonate through the cosmos.

“Music connects us across time and space in a unique way,” stated ESA Director Joseph Ashbacher. “The European Space Agency is sharing the spotlight with Johann Strauss II and inspiring future space scientists and explorers who will one day journey to the anthem of the universe.”

Source: www.nbcnews.com

Human-like robot masters the waltz through mimicking human actions

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Humanoid robot waltzes with the help of AI trained on human motion capture recordings

Xuxin Cheng and Mazeyu Ji

AI that helps humanoid robots mirror human movements could allow robots to walk, dance, and fight in more human-like ways.

The most agile and fluid robot movements, such as Boston Dynamics’ impressive demonstration of robotic acrobatics, are typically narrow, pre-programmed sequences. Teaching robots a wide repertoire of persuasive human movements remains difficult.

In order to overcome this hurdle, Peng Xuanbin at the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues have developed an artificial intelligence system called ExBody2. This allows the robot to imitate various human movements in a more realistic way and execute them smoothly.

Peng and his team began by building a database of possible movements that a humanoid robot could perform, from simple movements such as standing and walking to more complex movements such as tricky dance moves. Created. The database contained motion capture recordings of hundreds of human volunteers collected in previous research projects.

“Humanoid robots share a similar physical structure with us, so it makes sense to leverage the vast amount of human movement data that is already available,” Peng says. “By learning to imitate this kind of behavior, robots can quickly learn a variety of human-like behaviors. This means that anything humans can do, robots have the potential to learn.” It means something.”

To teach the pseudo-humanoid robot how to move, Peng and his team used reinforcement learning. In this learning, the AI ​​is given an example of what makes a successful move and then challenged to figure out how to do it yourself through trial and error. They started by training ExBody2 with full access to all the data on this virtual robot, including the coordinates of each joint, so it could mimic human movements as closely as possible. It then learned from these movements, using only data accessible in the real world, such as inertia and velocity measurements from sensors on the actual robot’s body.

After ExBody2 was trained on the database, it was able to control two different commercially available humanoid robots. It was able to smoothly combine simple movements such as walking in a straight line and crouching, as well as perform tricky movements such as following a 40-second dance routine, throwing punches, and waltzing with humans.

“Humanoid robots work best when all limbs and joints work together,” Penn says. “Many tasks and movements require coordination between the arms, legs, and torso, and whole-body coordination greatly increases the range of a robot’s capabilities.”

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Source: www.newscientist.com