Dan Tepfer's Player Piano Is His Composing Partner
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Re: Dan Tepfer's Player Piano Is His Composing Partner
#2My assumption was that this was going to be more like Google's A.I. Duet. But from the music in the video it seems like hes mostly using deterministic algorithms which is also pretty cool.
Re: Dan Tepfer's Player Piano Is His Composing Partner
#3Really 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 not much about the code, but a freeze frame at 1' 34" shows a Processing 3 logo [1] which is likely used for generating the real-time graphics for performances, and can also be used to communicate with devices. I think it says great things about the state of programming languages when barriers can be made small enough for professional pianists to make something for themselves!
Re: Dan Tepfer's Player Piano Is His Composing Partner
#4My assumption was that this was going to be more like Google's A.I. Duet. But from the music in the video it seems like hes mostly using deterministic algorithms which is also pretty cool.
Yeah, and this sounds much better. Though the player is much more competent too.
I want to hear an algorithm that analyzes the last however many scale tones and models the tonality in real-time so that the piano can intelligently harmonize with the player. It seems like he's just doing simpler stuff like looping, inverting the tones, etc.
Re: Dan Tepfer's Player Piano Is His Composing Partner
#5[deleted]
Re: Dan Tepfer's Player Piano Is His Composing Partner
#6Really 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…
[deleted]
Re: Dan Tepfer's Player Piano Is His Composing Partner
#7Really 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 this is particularly knew or innovative when, for example, Philippe Manoury was doing the same three decades ago.
Re: Dan Tepfer's Player Piano Is His Composing Partner
#8There is a great course over at cadenza, focused on computational interaction with the piano: https://www.kadenze.com/courses/reinventing-the-piano/info
Re: Dan Tepfer's Player Piano Is His Composing Partner
#9You don't even need an expensive piano, almost any digital piano could interact with your laptop via MIDI interface. Only thing you'd miss is haptic feedback of keys being pressed automatically.
That said, aside from simple symmetry and echo effects, it would be challenging to build on top of this with a system that would adapt to changes of key, tempo and playing style. As in article, human player is always the one who is adapting to fixed algorithm.
Re: Dan Tepfer's Player Piano Is His Composing Partner
#10For those who have not heard of him, a good introduction is his set of improvisations on Bach's Goldberg Variations.
"Goldberg Variations / Variations": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8WGcjB6ryI
Discussion: http://dantepfer.com/blog/?p=444
Also, the animations are stringly reminiscent of the work of Stephen Malinowski ("smalin"). The one around 3:00 is similar to the visualization he made for a guitar transcription of Clair de Lune, but the "balls" look like Euler's Tonnetz[0] grids.
Edit: I commented before reading TFA, where this is referenced. Silly me.