Portable Measurement and Mapping of Continuous Piano Gesture

This paper presents a portable optical measurement system for capturing continuous key motion on any piano. Very few concert venues have MIDI-enabled pianos, and many performers depend on the versatile but discontinued Moog PianoBar to provide MIDI from a conventional acoustic instrument. The scanner hardware presented in this paper addresses the growing need for alternative solutions while surpassing existing systems in the level of detail measured. Continuous key position on both black and white keys is gathered at 1kHz sample rate. Software extracts traditional and novel features of keyboard touch from each note, which can be flexibly mapped to sound using MIDI or Open Sound Control. RGB LEDs provide rich visual feedback to assist the performer in interacting with more complex sound mapping arrangements. An application is presented to the magnetic resonator piano, an electromagneticallyaugmented acoustic grand piano which is performed using continuous key position measurements.