Andrew McPherson
Youngmoo Kim
ABSTRACT
Although the capabilities of electronic musical instruments have grown exponentially over the past decades, many performers continue to prefer acoustic instruments, perceiving them to be more expressive than their electronic counterparts. We seek to create a new application for computer music interfaces by augmenting, rather than replacing, acoustic instruments. Starting with an acoustic grand piano, an optical keyboard scanner measures the continuous position of every key while electromagnetic actuators directly induce the strings to vibration. Unlike the traditional piano, the performer is given the ability to continuously modulate the sound of each note, resulting in a new creative vocabulary. Ongoing work explores the creation of intelligent mappings from sensed user input to acoustic control parameters which build on the existing musical intuition of trained pianists, creating a hybrid acoustic-electronic instrument that offers new expressive dimensions for human performers.
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Index Terms
- Toward a computationally-enhanced acoustic grand piano
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