Keirzo: The robot that can spit rhymes, keep time, and make you think about AI
Dr Richard Savery was named a NSW Young Tall Poppy award winner this year. Credit: Supplied
For Dr Richard Savery, a creative artificial intelligence and music researcher, the magic of robot musicians isn’t just in the code, it’s in the spark they ignite with the audience.
“I find a lot of people repeatedly ask robots the same questions,” he says. “I did a study on what people asked and an amazing amount of people, 20 percent, asked ‘What’s the meaning of life?’”
The Macquarie University Honorary Research Fellow is the brains behind Keirzo, one of the world’s first rapping robots, built in Sydney and capable of both drumming and performing original lyrics.
This 21 kilogram semi-humanoid robotic musician made of mostly 3D printed polymer is filled with AI and deep learning elements.
The $2000 4-year-old robotic musician has ear-like audio sensors, a speaker for a voice, and motorised arms tipped with drumsticks or mallets which strike drums and percussion instruments in response to human musicians.
Keirzo is a robotic musician which can rap and drum. Credit: Supplied
“Some people will ask me ‘What do I say to the robot? What do I do? Do I say hello?’,” Dr Savery, a 2025 NSW Young Tall Poppy award winner, says.
“Other people will approach the robot like it’s a human and have a conversation with it.”
This robot doesn’t just play music — it learns it.
To master drumming, Keirzo listens to and mimics recordings, practising until it can replicate what it hears.
Its “ears” — advanced audio sensors — detect rhythm and tone, while its software analyses patterns and adapts in real time.
Even Keirzo’s voice was self-created. Drawing from its own algorithms, Keirzo generates and raps original lyrics, responding to human performers or audience cues with improvised lines in real time.
Unlike Dr Savery, who is a professional saxophonist, clarinettist and flautist who trained at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Keirzo is a rapper and plays the drums.
“I wanted a medium of music that people can connect with,” the music researcher says.
“You must be a jazz performer to interact with a jazz robot, but with rap, you can talk to a robot as you would talk normally to a person and converse, which is a big part of this…improvising and rapping is an interesting way to study robotics.”
The quirky robot - named after a blend of his daughters’ names, Kirra and Zoe - seems like a novelty act.
But Dr Savery built the robot to explore human robot interaction and AI, a cutting-edge field attracting global attention, especially as AI tools increasingly enter music, writing, and film.
Behind the flashing LEDs and rhythmic beats lies a serious experiment in creative artificial intelligence, and a window into the future of how humans and machines might learn, perform and create together.
“I study how changes in the robot affect trust or empathy, or how we interact with robots,” he says.
“Music is such a powerful way to explore this because music is a universal language, it’s a core part of being a human. It’s an interesting way to study how we interact with robots generally.
“We’ve found that the voice a robot uses can raise or lower our trust; that adding a subtle ‘breathing’ cue can change how people perceive it; and that a person’s own level of extraversion shapes how extraverted they want the robot to be.”
Dr Savery says he was always fascinated by technology and music, coding and playing music from a young age.
After studying jazz performance at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, he pursued a master’s in music technology at the University of California and composed music for video games.
In university, he questioned his teachers’ idea that “you can’t teach jazz, you just have to play it”.
The researcher thought that if he could teach a computer, robot or AI to play music, it might reveal the underlying structure of how humans make and understand music.
He then completed a PhD in robotics and AI performance at Georgia Tech, where he helped develop Shimon, a robotic marimba player turned rapper which cost $100,000 in parts alone.
Shimon was the world’s first robot to participate in a rap battle.
Keirzo, however, is his first solo creation, designed and built entirely by the creative AI researcher.
“Everything around Keirzo is designed about how it can relate to humans,” Dr Savery says.
“There’s a rib cage that moves in and out and it looks like it breathes.”
That design choice is deliberate. “If a robot stops moving, people tend to think it’s broken,” Dr Savery says. “So, there’s a head nodding up and down and there’s LEDs too.”
Backed by an ARC DECRA Fellowship, Dr Savery is now developing an ensemble of four Keirzo-like robots as a DECRA Research Fellow at the University of Canberra, where he is exploring how groups of humans and machines can perform and evolve together over time.
“I’ll be able to have them play together in a band or have them in different places – like a museum - for longer term.”
The music researcher has found that people will love working with robots for 30 minutes, “best thing ever, but that’s very different to working with a robot every week for six months. So having multiple robots allows me to have one in someone’s house where they work with it over six months, and then maybe they’ll hate it after two weeks, or work out how that can work together over the longer term.”
For Dr Savery, Keirzo isn’t about creating the next AI hitmaker with a rapping robot.
His work is raising profound questions about what it means to perform with a robot, whether creativity and emotion can be shared with machines, and how humans connect with intelligent, responsive systems.
“If you can make a robot play music, you can probably teach it to do almost anything.”