Twenty-First Century Piano

“The reinvigoration of the role of the human body” as John Richards recently described trends in using homemade electronics to move away from laptop performance [1] is mirrored in an ambition of instrumentalists to interact more closely with the electronic sounds they are helping to create. For these players, there has often been a one-way street of the ‘instrument feeds MAX patch’ paradigm and arguments are made here for more complete performance feedback systems. Instrumentalists come to the question of interactivity with a whole array of gestures, sounds and associations already in place, so must choose carefully the means by which the instrumental performance is augmented. Frances-Marie Uitti [2] is a pioneer in the field, creating techniques to amplify the cellist’s innate performative gestures and in parallel developing the instrument. This paper intends to give an overview of the author’s work in developing interactivity in piano performance, mechanical augmentation of the piano and possible structural developments of the instrument to bring it into the twentyfirst century.