Robots being used instead of live persons as musicians. [View all]

I spoke with my friend, a professional musician for nearly 55 years, a trumpeter, yesterday.

He recently lost a slew of jobs for live performance that were canceled because a new entity severely underbid his contractor. Not with another group of musicians. But a combination of a synthesizer and humanoid robots playing instruments. Apparently the latter was developed in Japan. Each robot is programmed to hold the instrument at the correct angle, to imitate the embouchure, etc. while having the sound of the instrument emit from a speaker in the robot. Think of it as the robots in Disney World playing at events, weddings, in clubs, etc.

He has a bad feeling about this trend as he believes that listeners can't tell the difference between "live" and robot, and/or if they did, they won't care. For example, instead of hiring a wedding band for the reception, the robots in their tuxedos were hired and the cost was $3,000 to $5,000 less, you know who'd win . . . . .

My friend kind of saw this coming as he's lost jobs in recording to synthesizers over the decades, but he always believed that his live performances were comparatively safe.