I was watching a demonstration video of a robotic vibraphone today on Gizmodo. [1] It plays “Flight of the Bumblebee”, which is already a pretty fast piece, but does it a bit faster than normal. Impressive, but when you realize that it accomplishes this with independent actuators for each note (effectively having dozens of “hammers” where a human would be limited to a couple) it really becomes less amazing.
And then I came across absolutely staggeringly fast rendition of Flight of the Bumblebee by an honest to goodness human being. It is a Guinness book of World Records performance on the guitar by Tiago della Vega [2], and completely, utterly, and resoundingly trounces the robotic performance. Note that he actually performs the piece three times: at 170, 260, and 320 beats per minute: you have to watch to the end to see the fastest rendition.
Even if a machine ever exceeds this rate, I am left speechless by what the human machine can accomplish.