The Piano

The Gesturally Extended Piano

This paper introduces the Gesturally Extended Piano—an augmented instrument controller that relies on information drawn from performer motion tracking in order to control real-time audiovisual processing and synthesis. Specifically, the positions, heights, velocities, and relative distances and angles of points on the hands and forearms are followed. Technical details and installation of the tr...

The Elbow Piano: Sonification of Piano Playing Movements

The Elbow Piano distinguishes two types of piano touch: a touch with movement in the elbow joint and a touch without. A played note is first mapped to the left or right hand by visual tracking. Custom-built goniometers attached to the player's arms are used to detect the type of touch. The two different types of touches are sonified by different instrument sounds. This gives the player an incre...

The Acoustics of the Piano

The Piano Music Companion

We present a system that we call ‘The Piano Music Companion’ and that is able to follow and understand (at least to some extent) a live piano performance. Within a few seconds this system can identify the piece that is being played, and the position within the piece. It then tracks the progress of the performer over time via a robust score following algorithm. The companion is useful in multipl...

Modeling the grand piano

A global model of a piano is presented. Its aim is to reproduce the main vibratory and acoustic phenomena involved in the generation of a piano sound from the initial blow of the hammer against the strings to the radiation from soundboard to the air. One first originality of the work is due to the string model which takes both geometrical nonlinear effects and stiffness into account. Other sign...