The only thing I remember is vaguely setting up the job,
and then I remember, like, a pink flash.
I thought bomb went off, or I was in a fire,
or something exploded,
because I looked down at my body
and I was just completely cooked.
I got life-flighted to Grady Memorial Hospital,
to their burn unit.
After about the seventh surgery,
they told me that my ulnar artery that was supplying
blood to my right hand was non-existent.
My hand was pretty much just going to die.
And so that's when I told them to amputate it.
I was always really ADD growing up.
When I was 15,
my parents got me a drum kit for Christmas,
and I was playing rhythms the first day I got it,
Eric Clapton and B.B. King.
My thoughts in the hospital
after I had my hand amputated was:
I'm not playing drums anymore,
I'm not playing guitar anymore.
Everything you can do with 2 or 1 hand.
All of these things thrown at my face at one time,
and it kind of weighed down heavy.
You can only stay depressed for so long.
There is really no other option
besides to take what you have and do something with it.
My teacher showed me some videos of this robot,
Shimon, that played marimba.
I was just completely mind blown.
And so I was all excited,
and I was like, Gil is probably the guy I should talk to.
So everyone is talking now about robots taking our jobs,
and some people look at me, and say:
Are you evil?
I understand a robot that will build a car
and take manufacturing jobs.
I even understand a robot that will clean
a floor and will take cleaning jobs.
But are you going to take music from us,
music, the most human and emotional thing?
Obviously, the answer is a huge no.
My robots are there in order to inspire humans,
in order to take humans,
and push them to new directions,
and explore new things.
They don't have instructions,
they don't follow pre-recorded anything.
Everything that they do is based on what they listen.
About a couple of years ago,
I got an email from Jason Barnes,
who I didn't know,
and he said:
I lost my arm in an accident.
It was very devastating for me.
Life for me was music.
I'm a drummer.
I saw your videos online.
Can you maybe use some of your technology
to develop a robotic arm?
The main thing that he wanted was
to be able to control the grip of the stick,
but he doesn't have a wrist, and he doesn't have a palm.
So he cannot control how hard he hits
and that's very important,
that's a lot of expression from drummers
to hit very tight, and to hit very loose.
I really saw the potential.
We can really make something amazing from that.
As soon as I got the email back from him,
I was just in awe.
It was kind of great to have somebody on my side
that was willing to help me get my life back.
We sort of brainstormed,
Gil and I,
and some other classmates, and some colleagues,
about how we could develop
an electromechanical device that would replace the
functionality of his lost fingers, and hand, and wrist.
We put some EMG sensors on his arm,
and based off of how he flexes,
it recreates the bounce capability.
After eight months, we called him and said,
it's ready.
He didn't see the arm until that day that it came back
from California from this company maker.
He was really amazed the first time he used it.
Without the project, we probably wouldn't have met,
but now we are gigging buddies.
We travel around the world and play together.
They have this robotic band that's been out for a while,
and it's just a bunch of robots,
but everything is pre-programmed,
nothing is improvised, nobody is jamming.
With something like this,
it brings a whole new thing to the table
having a half robot, half-man band
just kind of coinciding with each other.
The robots, they never mess up.
Everything is on time, everything is steady.
You can get to a point where the music
sounds really robotic, and just too perfect,
and there is no feel behind it,
but a lot of times,
you just kind of get caught up in the moment,
and you don't really realize that it's a robot.
Even though they might be playing the same style,
like jazz, or rock, or something,
you're going to get different types of improvisations,
or different types of phrasing,
just because Shimon
is not physically shaped like a person.
There's no other person on the planet that has
eight arms like Shimon does,
that can play all of these different patterns that
Shimon is capable of.
Or even with Jason and his prosthetic,
he's able to play 40 hertz with one hand
which is ridiculous.
Nobody can do that.
When you come with
your human emotion and expression,
and you are met with robots that have
computation power and mechanical abilities,
that can be a spark that will lead to amazing music
that will really be something new and unique.
I was, like, on the plane to, I believe it was France,
and I kind of just was thinking:
What exactly would I be doing
if this wouldn't have happened to me?
I'd be at home, working the same job,
not really doing anything.
And I'm like: I'm traveling now, my life is awesome,
I'm going places and getting paid to play music,
which is all I ever wanted to do in the first place.
If you'd see something like that in a 90's movie,
it's science fiction,
and now people are having to move stuff
out of science fiction and put it in nonfiction,
because that kind of stuff is real now.