Media and Arts Technology Documentaries - Sound and Music Computing Queen Mary, University of London

Sound is produced without loudspeakers using electromagnetic actuators to directly manipulate the piano strings, expanding its vocabulary to include infinite sustain, notes that crescendo from silence, harmonics, and new timbres. A sensor on the keyboard reports the continuous position of every key. Time and spatial resolution are sufficient to capture detailed data about key press, release, pretouch, aftertouch, and other extended gestures. The system, which is designed with cost and setup constraints in mind, seeks to give pianists continuous control over the musical sound of their instrument.

Every participant is provided with their own physical user interface allowing for a personalized musical contribution within this collaborative context. In this way, all players can fully tune into an immediate, democratic and stimulating collaborative musical experience.

It allows touch interaction with timbre in an intuitive and visually intriguing way. A mesh of springs is displayed on screen and can be deformed, plucked and vibrated using the fingers. The displacement of a path on the mesh is scanned at the frequency of a musical note, and constantly evolving tones are created.