Auto Gaming

I think I heard this story a while ago, but now is the first time I actually remembered the address. An electronics engineer made a small device that automatically plays the game Guitar Hero, scoring better than any human ever possibly could, because it never makes mistakes.
Guitar hero is a "rhythym game," in which players use a plastic replica of an electric guitar to press buttons as they appear on a scrolling musical scale, in tribute to Bach's famous quote about musicianship: “I just press the right keys (buttons) at the right time and the organ does the rest. ” The guitar vaugely resembles the actual action of playing a guitar, in which a guitarist holds down some of the strings to change the effective length, and thus the pitch, of the vibrating string. Players of Guitar hero have about two seconds head-warning before they need to press the respective button.
Anyway, the machine receives a video signal, analyzes this signal, and uses it to determine when to send the button-push signal back to the game console. Two seconds is enough time for the computer to have completed its analysis, so the machine literally can't fail.
Why do this project? For one, it's an interesting look at video-analysis. Visual recognition is currently one of the weaker areas in computers. Show a computer a picture and it will interpret it only as a matrix of colors. Attempts to recognize pictures of people, useful for "We have a picture of a person walking into an airport. Is this person one of these people who are wanted criminals?" have been foiled by wearing different glasses, growing or shaving facial hair, or other things that wouldn't fool a human for even a second. There is big money, then, in getting computers to actually understand what it is that they are looking at.
For another, it's the "because I can" effect. Getting a computer to exactly copy a human action is an impressive boast.

Music Education

Once upon a time, I was a hobby musician who would engage in one hour music writing contests -- you had to write a song in one hour, songs are voted by the writers (excluding your own), and winner gets...bragging rights for the week. I even took a music class to become a better writer, which was linked to a singing class that I was no good at. I think it's hilarious that I got an A in the music writing, but an F in the actual performing, making me some sort of hypothetical musician. Can write great songs, but only in theory. And of course with the weekly contests...I was almost always last place.
Anyway, all I've studied music all my life, and all the crazy things I tried to do for just the write sound, are all quite familiar to an amazing group of musicians that I just discovered. Los Doggies are musicians who dissected for me tons and tons of incidental music. Video games. Animals. Telephones. All of them have a complex musical basis. The website takes them all apart, showing them sheet music, and even playing the sound note by note if you don't know how to read sheet music. (I can, not quite fast enough to play the song in question.) This site has taught me more about music than years and years of musical education in only a few minutes.
I'd like to know why. All of education could probably benefit if I could just figure out why this site is so engaging and informative.

Nonhuman Music

I have four tracks of music on my computer that were written by something that wasn't a human being. This is not a surprise to me -- birds and some other animals use music for communication and whatnot, but it has disturbed some people who believe that music is somehow uniquely human.
Two of the tracks are by an elephant orchestra in Thailand. Elephants write rather strange music by human terms, with a jarring and chaotic sound. This doesn't disturb the critics, because they can easily proclaim it not to be real music.
The other two are written by a computer program, in the style of European classical music, as was popular from 1400 - 1800. They are indistinguishable from a composition written by a person back then, and that really bothers people. because they feel that only a human being can produce music that touches their emotions like that, and if a computer can do it, maybe their feelings somehow weren't real in the first place.
The program, EMI, has undergone a lot of evolution. It was first taught to write music according to rules, but that proved too boring. So then its author, Miller McCune, reviewed how classical composers wrote, and they did often break their own rules. So randomness and rule breaking were introduced. Many small improvements later, it was writing music that could fool all the critics.
In a way, it doesn't compete with human composers, because human composers can work with many different styles, and can even chose styles, while the program is limited to one style.
Personally I have dabbled in music, but I ironically seem to be some sort of hypothetical composer, being quite able to produce interesting scores, but unable to actually perform them. Strange. I like this idea, because people love music, and this ensures that there will be a lot of it.

Talking Piano

Vocoders are a sound-engineering technology that allows arbitrary musical instruments to "talk," using a splitting technology made for sending phone converstaions with less bandwidth.
So, messing around with it, one guy invented a talking piano. Well, why not?

Reverse MIDI

Computer music fans for the last 30 years have enjoyed the MIDI standard interface for representing musical scores and recording them. MIDI can be captured into a file for later playback, and the internet is currently riddled with MIDI sequence files of almost every conceivable song. (Including ones generated by various algorithms.) However, playback of this file is currently limited to expensive electronic keyboards, or sound-card built-in synthesizers. The sound-card synthesizers almost always sound like complete crap, unless the sound-card is ludicrously expensive.
So what if I had a bank of physical instruments, a controller card, and miles of cables with mobile arms that plucked (or pressed, or whatever) the instruments according to midi signals. All of this would connect to a midi-compatible electronic board, that would connect to a computer. The computer could put midi-signals into the card, which would play the instruments accordingly. It would be massively expensive, although awesome. Your own automated private orchestra.
If the bank of instruments also has attached microphones, there are computer programs in existence that can interpret a sound wave as MIDI events. You would then have a Reverse-Reverse-MIDI setup that allows an orchestra to perform in a way that a computer can record, and play back at will. It's massively insane, though I can imagine a wealthy music-fan desiring and enjoying exactly this kind of setup.
Unlike some other massively automated systems, this has advantages that doesn't eliminate its own purpose, although it probably costs more than anyone who would benefit from it would be willing to pay. Musical instruments are mind-bogglingly expensive.