During a Chinese music festival, a humanoid robot named “Adam” graced the stage in what was half performance art and half marketing stunt — and did so while semi-disguised in a loose-fitting hoodie that did a terrible job obscuring its mechanical legs and hands that made it very clear that it was, indeed, a robot.
As spotted by New AtlasAdam the robot was dressed in a loose grey sweatshirt with the hood up, a long face mask, and Yeezy-style sneakers — but, let’s be real, no pants — as it played keytar alongside virtuosic drummer and singer Hu Yutong and his band at the VOYAGEX Music Festival in Changchun, China.
Weighing in at about 136 pounds, this skinny legend — and all of its bipedal brethren, who are also named Adam — is made by a Chinese startup called PNDbotics.
Though all models still appear to be in the prototype stage, the keytar-playing one appears to be an Adam-SP, which is slated to cost about $100,000. That’s pretty low compared to the $45,000 charged for pre-orders of the Adam-U model, though that one could well get out-rocked even harder by its human bandmates.
In video from the mid-July performance, Adam was seen standing relatively still as it plucked out a serviceable, if not almost certainly pre-programmed, keytar sequence. Placed behind and to the right of the bandleader’s drumkit platform, you could almost mistake the groove-spewing robot for the real thing — until you notice its metallic limbs and extremely sleepy body motion that makes the Chuck E. Cheese band look riveting by comparison.
Unsurprisingly, reactions to the hoodie-wearing robot keytarist varied.
On PNDbotics’ YouTube video of the performance, for instance, one of the top comments skewers Adam as the “world’s most expensive and overcomplicated MIDI controller,” while another suggested that the robot was given the “easiest chords to hit.”
On Reddit, meanwhile, users struck a rare optimist note.
“This is kinda sick,” user Hawt_Dog_II quipped on the r/Wevolver subreddit. “AI music is lame but a robot playing human music turns out to be pretty sick actually.”
These sorts of AI stunts will, inevitably, end up being divisive and oversaturated — but heck, for now, everybody on stage looks like they’re having a good time.
More on robot music: Fusion Startup Conducts Strange Ceremony Involving Woman With Wires Coming Out of Her Back
