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Dan Tepfer's Player Piano Is His Composing Partner

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Re: Dan Tepfer's Player Piano Is His Composing Partner

#11
post #3

Really awesome, what a wonderful way to expand one's horizon on an instrument. In simple terms, he is making a custom delay-box for a fancy player-piano (the Yamaha Disklavier). For one example he programmed the piano to be symmetric (i.e. any note on one side will nearly immediately play a cognate key from the other side). In another example he has the piano play inversions of arpeggios after he plays them. There is…

Barriers have been pretty low for a while now. At IRCAM in the 1980s, visiting composers would typically first be assigned a computer expert to help them, but many of them soon learned to work with e.g. PatchWork or OpenMusic themselves, unassisted (typically programming in Lisp in those days). While I'm happy that this contemporary pianist is able to get the behaviour he wants from his instrument, I don't see how th…

That's cool, I didn't know that!

I'm still amazed at the low barrier nowadays - I just sat down this morning with my keyboard and computer. I downloaded Processing and MidiBus and had Tepfer style symmetric piano and delay working in under 30 minutes (though I had a dusty understanding of Java to begin with). [1] I think I'm inspired to try my own Tepfer-piano playing...

[1]: https://gist.github.com/schollz/f8ec8687e7de784aee6831fb2ca2...

Re: Dan Tepfer's Player Piano Is His Composing Partner

#12
Really cool! Especially how the technology inside the piano keeps the aesthetic of a standard one and only needs a single end connection to a laptop. Previous audio switching and routing equipment I've used has needed a myriad of ports ranging from serial, ethernet, and usb in order to interface with all of them. Combining this into a single system really allows for a user to learn the toolchain quickly and be able to apply algorithms and custom modulation to make the art uniquely their own.

Re: Dan Tepfer's Player Piano Is His Composing Partner

#13
post #3

Really awesome, what a wonderful way to expand one's horizon on an instrument. In simple terms, he is making a custom delay-box for a fancy player-piano (the Yamaha Disklavier). For one example he programmed the piano to be symmetric (i.e. any note on one side will nearly immediately play a cognate key from the other side). In another example he has the piano play inversions of arpeggios after he plays them. There is…

Personally i have found that the problem with programming these days is not the language, but finding a solid reference for all the libraries.
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