A new robot doesn’t just have a mouth on it, it is just a mouth! Singing robots have always been a bit weird but not quite as weird as this robot which is essentially just a mouth complete with a set of lips and nothing much else about it in terms of physical appearance.
Imagine a pair of artificial lips that are designed to imitate the real mouth as closely as possible. Doesn’t matter if you can’t, Professor Hideyuki Sawada from Kagawa University in Japan already designed it. The mouth is the latest innovation in robotic and is actually teaching itself to sing, complete with vocal cords.
Robot mouth sings "Kagome Kagome"
The professor wants to replicate the organs involved in human speech, the lungs, trachea, vocal cords, vocal tract and last but not least, the nasal cavity. As of now it is an air pump that creates air-flow through the faux organs, allowing them to produce the desired sound waves.
The bionic mouth is fed an audio recording and then it begins to reproduce what was said in the recording. It goes through the various positions in the organs to see which series of positions allows it to produce the voice closest to the audio recording that it is copying.