Steinway’s New Piano Can Play a Perfect Concerto by Itself | Hacker News Reader

Steinway’s New Piano Can Play a Perfect Concerto by Itself

wired.com

19 pointsscottcha14 comments

Anyone else get sense the desperation in this?

Once upon a time every middle-class home had to have a piano. Now they are relics. Sales of home pianos have tanked. Steinway sells to the pros, a small market, and the very rich. But those very rich who were raised with pianos in every home are getting older. Their kids don't want to spend $$$,$$$ on a great piano and the maintenance it requires. So Steinway is injecting technology in hopes of keeping the rich onside.

Pianos, the good ones, last for decades. But what will this ipod-dependant thing look like in 2030 or 2060? Will they join their brethren in concert halls, or lie forgotten in grandma's storage locker? An old Steinway is a useful device capable of doing the same job today as it did when built. An network-enabled ipad accessory will not age so well.

Not to be that guy, but. You can't play a concerto by yourself because a concerto is when you play as a soloist with an orchestra. And you can't really say "a perfect concerto" like "a perfect arpeggio". Would make more sense to say "Can play a sonata by itself perfectly."

You can't, and near as I can tell, this piano can't. However, some Clavinovas on the market [e.g. Yamaha], could theoretically be used to play a perfect [or extremely close to perfect] Concerto by themselves.

I agree however that the headline was sloppy. Someone wishing to cast the impression of being an audiophile should have taken more care.

Not to take away from this piano though, I enjoyed listening to it. If I had $120,000 to throw away on an expensive piece of furniture that I could play myself from time to time, I'd really enjoy looking at this every day.

This is not new. Steinway has these systems for years; only news is the piano can talk to an ipad now ...

The first systems that could reproduce dynamics are from 1904: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=h...

There are actually lots of old piano roll recordings from great artists like Rachmaninoff, Gershwin any many others around. Some people actually scanned them and converted them to MIDI: http://www.pianola.co.nz/public/

These files can now be played on a Yamaha Disklavier, or the Steinway CEUS or now this new one.

Or they can be played with software-modeled pianos like PianoTeq or sampled-based software pianos. Really nice.

Piano rolls have survived for over a century. I wonder whether these performances will have the same longevity.

Yamaha has been doing this for at least a decade, recording performers for their player grands. I don't know how intense the home market is but they've used them for master classes and competitions remotely; pretty interesting as a teaching tool.

Also, Jenny Lin is a fantastic pianist, check her out.

Yes, I find it really frustrating that the article doesn't contrast at all with the previous state of the art. I seem to remember that the Yamaha pianos you mention already had significantly better than MIDI reproduction capabilities way back when. Getting all excited about the new system without mentioning how much of an improvement it is makes this sound like a press release rather than a well-researched article.

Yeah, it makes it sound like current systems (diskclavier, etc) don't use any dynamics per note, which just is not true.

Having played quite a large number of the Yamaha Clavinovas over the years, I can concur. Knowing this makes this read exactly as if it were a press release, or at least an article written by a Steinway Fanboy... of course, I can't blame someone for being a Steinway Fanboy, there's just something about a Steinway that stands on its own.

This one has some more info: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/luxury/technology/69041/steinway-...

Yes,you can record yourself playing slowly and then hear how it'll sound once you've done the hard work. Great fun - hearing yourself play faster than Martha Argerich!

Also, piano rolls have something of the culture of the Wild West which you can't take away from. Having one of these has an air of history greater than itself - it conjures images of smokey saloons, dusty wooden floorboards, Billy the Kid and girls in bustiers. For everything that a Steinway has, even a self playing Steinway, it will never have that.

I can't see the player. I also tried with ublock disabled.

I approve

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