A MultiChannel Embedded DSP ClosedLoop Control System for Musical Robots The continuous automatic calibration of musical robots is an important step toward enabling them to create accurate, reliable, and expressive performances. Several attempts have been made to achieve this using external laptops, singleboard computers and offtheshelf hardware, but these solutions have various drawbacks that preclude their use in many musical robotics contexts. This paper presents a new, custombuilt embedded DSP system that is capable of up to 32 channels of high quality audio input and output, created to carry out musical information retrieval tasks on the sonic output of musical robots in real time while they are performing. The results of these analyses are continuously fed to musical robot control hardware in order to inform their performance. The design and construction of the circuit board is described, the Musical Information Retrieval (MIR)based algorithms carried out by the board are outlined, the systemxe2x80x99s performance in representative applications are evaluated, and its various implications to the field of musical robotics and beyond are discussed. By integrating this system into new musical robots, the result is instruments that are able to xe2x80x98listenxe2x80x99 to the audible results of their own actuations in real time, and continuously calibrate their actions to best represent the intentions of the programmed musical composition or live input.

Improved AuditoryInspired Signal Processing Algorithm Design for Tracking Multiple Frequency Components An adaptive synchrony capture filterbank (SCFB) signal processing architecture for tracking signal frequency components was proposed in a previous paper. Detailed analysis and further improvements are presented here. The original SCFB signal processing architecture consisted of a fixed array of traditional, passive linear, gammatone filters in cascade with a bank of three adaptively tunable bandpass filters that form part of a frequency discriminator loop (FDL). The SCFB exhibits many desirable properties for processing speech, music, and other complex sounds. In this article, an improved SCFB architecture is presented along with detailed specification of parameters that yield better frequency tracking. This architecture combines a FDL with a phaselocked loop, a concept borrowed from communication systems, to acquire and track frequency components in a timevarying signal. This modified algorithm estimates frequencies with higher accuracy even in the presence of closely spaced tones in the input. The improved performance of the algorithm is demonstrated by comparing the mean square error in the frequency estimates of synthetic timevarying signals.