Intervista su The Times

Roberto Prosseda gave an in-depth interview to James Imam for The Times of London, exploring the relationship between human artists and artificial intelligence, with particular reference to his experience with TeoTronico, the robot pianist at the heart of his innovative music outreach project.

The article, published on November 1, 2026, can be read here: https://www.thetimes.com/article/a202005f-bcb0-4921-92fd-93a71510315a?shareToken=ae632d7061b50be6ce135bdf76b523b5

This robot has 53 fingers and perfect timing. Is it a pianist?

A classical musician and the AI-driven TeoTronico challenge audiences to consider what matters most when they hear music: technical ability or interpretation

Seated at a grand piano in his studio near Florence, one of Italy’s leading concert pianists is arguing with a robot about which of them is a better musician.

“I’m objectively better,” TeoTronico, a forthright, 53-fingered robotic pianist powered by artificial intelligence, tells The Times. “Fifty-three fingers means no wrong notes, perfect timing and absolute precision. Composers wrote their intentions clearly, I simply execute them. Roberto prefers interpretation, which I believe is just code for inconsistency. Do you agree Roberto?”

Roberto Prosseda, the award-winning pianist who runs the studio, begs to differ, making a more measured case for the superiority of human musicians.

“It’s good to have robots who play the piano quite well, from a technical point of view, because it makes us more aware of our human, more important priorities,” suggests Prosseda, 51, who has performed at venues including La Scala in Milan, the Berlin Philharmonie and London’s Wigmore Hall. “Not just being precise but doing things that robots can never do: moving people, making audiences cry.”

We are speaking via Zoom days after Prosseda unveiled an upgraded version of TeoTronico, his robotic sparring partner of nearly 15 years, during a showdown at Bologna University on Tuesday.

Once a mere MIDI player programmed to reproduce music, TeoTronico’s software has now been plugged into Google’s Gemini chatbot, improving its ability to hold unscripted conversations and opening up a range of future possibilities.

“It can participate in a panel discussion, give speeches, even do a Ted Talk,” Prosseda explains of the robot, which is still getting to grips with the customs of polite conversation as it interrupts its interlocutor. “It will also soon give a piano lesson, perhaps offering students advice that is different from, or even contrary to, what I would give,” Prosseda adds.

The technology raises a fundamental question: could machines eventually make human musicians obsolete, as TeoTronico predicts, or do they simply remind us that the qualities of human musicians are irreplaceable?

Audiences were invited to grapple with those questions at Tuesday’s concert in Bologna, a futuristic duel drawing on a rich tradition of musical contests through history that have pitted the likes of Mozart, Beethoven and Liszt against contemporary rivals.

The pair took turns to play works by Chopin, Scarlatti, Scriabin and the singer-songwriter Toto Cutugno’s 1983 hit The Italian. The music was interspersed with TeoTronico commenting on his human rival’s imperfections and Prosseda highlighting aspects of drama and narrative apparently lacking in the machine’s renditions.

“The score is not the music,” Prosseda says. “It is only the starting point for the interpreter, who has to discover the complete idea behind it.”

TeoTronico, who has performed in South Korea, China and Brazil, counters: “Perfect execution is ultimate respect for the composer’s vision … If you value reliability over chaos, then precision is truly beautiful.”

Built in 2007 by Matteo Suzzi, a robot maker based near Bologna, TeoTronico began life with 29 electromagnetically actuated fingers, acquiring mechanical feet for playing piano pedals a decade later. It has an expressive face with a moving mouth, eyes and eyebrows, and cameras and proximity sensors allowing it to turn towards people and recognise their facial expressions.

Arranged in a row above the keyboard, its plastic fingers light up as they strike the keys with varying degrees of pressure. The humanoid excels in fiendish musical showstoppers, such as Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee, but also achieves something resembling moving introspection in a recent video recording of Bach’s meditative Prelude in C major.

It acquired a capacity for quasi-free speech last month when Suzzi incorporated software originally designed for RoboTanika, a robot comedian and talk show host who shot to fame after chatting up the influencer and model Taylor Mega on Italian TV. Prosseda says it could soon read scores and improvise.

Other experiments pairing cutting-edge technology with classical music include YuMi, a robotic conductor who led the Lucca Philharmonic Orchestra at a 2017 concert in Pisa featuring the tenor Andrea Bocelli, and a 2021 project in which musicologists and computer scientists used AI to complete Beethoven’s unfinished tenth symphony from fragmentary sketches.

But Prosseda warns that musicians risk falling into the trap of trying to match the indefatigable precision of machines rather than embracing what makes them human.

“It can no longer be enough to reproduce things that have already been done by other artists, because AI will soon be able to do that,” he says. “What AI cannot do is invent something that has never been done before. That is precisely what the human artist can — and must — do.”

Despite his onstage jousts with TeoTronico, Prosseda argues that technology should mainly remain outside the concert hall.

“Live music forces you to switch off your phone, disconnect from the online world and concentrate your attention for an hour on a single source of sound: the stage,” Prosseda says. “An in-person encounter, with someone looking you in the eyes without a phone in between, is increasingly becoming a luxury event.”

Even so, at their performance in Bologna last week the rivals put their differences aside to close the show with one of Schubert’s Marche militaires, a piano duet for four hands.

“Less than a danger, I see it as a way to better define what we should do as artists,” Prosseda says of robots. “They can be our friends and collaborators, provided we do not forget to be human.”