Gil Weinberg

Gil Weinberg (born 1967) is an Israeli-born musician and inventor of experimental musical instruments and musical robots. Weinberg is a professor of musical technology at Georgia Tech and director of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology.

Gil Weinberg was born in Jerusalem and began to study piano at the age of seven. His teachers were disciplinarians who insisted on proper posture and hand position, emphasizing technique and theory at the expense of creativity. When he began composing his own music, they claimed he had no right to do so before mastering the fundamentals. His rebellion against this approach led to much of what he does today. "I'm trying to get children to be creative and expressive long before they have technique and theory," Weinberg says. "They can express themselves by pushing, pulling and other motions. Music is something you can invent and improvise with. I'm sure that this is a much better way into this world than focusing on technique and theory in the beginning."

Weinberg did his undergraduate studies in an interdisciplinary program at Tel Aviv University with a focus on musicology. He received a master's degree and PhD from MIT Media Lab.

Weinberg has developed a number of novel musical instruments for novices, such as the Beatbugs, and the Squeezables before conceiving the field of Robotic Musicianship. In 2005, he created the world first improvising robot, Haile, which can listen to human musicians, improvise and play along using a variety of musical algorithms. His next inventions were Shimon an improvising robotic marimba player that can improvise like jazz masters, and Travis (also known as Shimi), a smart-phone enabled robotic musical companion that is designed to enhance listeners musical experiences. Shimi is currently being commercialized by Tovbot Inc.

In 1991, Weinberg and his partner Yigal Barkat founded a company called Sense Multimedia, which produced a CD-Rom edition of the Carta atlas, established The Third Ear website and developed one of the first karaoke software programs.

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