Gil Weinberg (1967 - ) is an Israeli-born musician and inventor of experimental musical instruments and musical robots.[1] Weinberg is a professor of musical technology at Georgia Tech and director of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology.[2]
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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."[3]
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.
Together with graduate student Scott Driscoll, Weinberg created Haile,[4] a robot that "listens" to what musicians are playing and plays along with them by means of music algorithms programmed into it.[5] Weinberg is also the creator of the electronic Beatbug percussion device, and Shimon, a music-playing robot that analyzes what it hears and then improvises. Shimon has been taught to improvise like some jazz masters.[6]
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.[7]
In 1994, Weinberg began working for Music Notes, where he established the multimedia division and developed products based on optic technology for reading music.[8]
In 2007, Weinberg founded ZOOZ Mobile, a musical software company, maker of the iPhone music app ZOOZbeat. He currently serves as the CTO and chairman of the company, which produces a set of musical applications for cell phones that allow music to be created in an expressive and intuitive manner.[9]