Ravenchord – A Radical Redesign of the Piano
whipsaw.com
whipsaw.com
Good on people for playing, imagining, considering, wondering, but I wish there were a tag or some way for me to avoid them, or just a more upfront admission of what it is. They always start so serious, full of world problem solving proclamations in present tense ("this solves / this will replace / enabling " etc) and only by mid way do you realize there's nothing there there :-/
For a second there I thought you were talking about the SV startup scene. "We're making the world a better place by..."
I would say, yes. This is, in a way, about SV startups.
SV startups on the other hand, actively make the world a worse place...
like if you’re going to waste everyone’s time, don’t waste your own too
just embarrasing
- if you're going to try to solve an actual challenge, improve on something, truly consider the design and purpose and limits and compromises and propose a different approach, brilliant
- but if all you're going to do is make a random somewhat pretty twist on existing thing, without actually considering the use, the purpose, the engineering, the what's and how's and why's, then... I'm kinda with him. What value did you add,that prompt to midjourney "create a spiral piano" wouldn't have?
I'm somewhat shocked by this overwhelmingly positive reaction to AI replacing human creativity so I may be overreacting? It just doesn't sit right with me — trading human subtlety for raw efficiency — but to each their own.
Creativity has nothing to do with professional aspiration and entertaining the humans for transactions.
Even in myself I'm finding curious emotional responses: I'm now growing less interested in some of the more synthesized / formulaic types of music, and more interested in live performances / recording with real instruments. For visual art that is art, that to me usually needs some human emotion, message, story, path. For "art" that is placeholder or functional, yeah a lot of that may get replaced by AI.
My point to this particular article is though, if their sum contribution to the world is the analogue of:
1. Short one-sentence prompt to AI that's basically "piano, but tear-shaped"
2. 37 paragraphs of self-aggrandizing meaningless prose that actively deceives on the accomplishment and status of the thing
Then it's not "human creativity" as far as I'm concerned, or at least not one that I want to actively encourage (and in fact, as I mentioned, I want to actively discourage / not partake in).
In other words, I'm not saying AI should be doing the kind of things exemplified in that article rather than humans. I'm saying I don't want to see / partake those kinds of things [if not quite "they shouldn't exist":], and it's partially because they don't contribute any human creativity, as far as I'm concerned. That's very different from "not seeing value in human creativity", so I think we may have misunderstood each other there?
But you're right, we probably misunderstood each other there. You definitely won the argument though :)
I do think it’s a beautiful design and would do great on stage. You need something to look at in the concert hall and machinery beats looking at a sole pianists hair and hand movement. It’s what I like about orchestras - so much skill to look at.
So the thing that is shown would need to have hammer commands crossed to work as advertised. If done mechanically, it would add considerable complexity to the design.
In the second one, you can see the keyboard, and the pointy end is on the bass side.
I feel that the latency of this setup would be quite noticeable compared to a fully mechanical action.
In the article they mentioned "[...] activated by solenoids, a proven technology even used on some Spirio Steinways.". On Spirio Steinways's website they advertise a player piano model called Spirio [0], and in the description it they mention their capabilities as "[...] measure hammer velocity (up to 1020 dynamic levels at a rate of up to 800 samples per second) [...]", a sensor at 800Hz would mean a sensing delay of 1.25ms as a starting point. To that we would need to add the mechanical delay of the solenoid, unfortunately I couldn't find a source for how fast are solenoids (the fastest I found was a solenoid hydraulic valve fully closes in 13ms, but that is the full travel, I couldn't find info on response time for first movement), so I'll make an out-of-my-ass guess that a fast solenoid starts acting in two or three ms, then round up and estimate the total delay to 4ms.
So would my 4ms guess be too much for a musician? I don't know, not my fields, my guess (I've been doing that a lot today) is that if we are talking tempo it is probably too little to matter. So my only worry would be phase, if a musician's ear is sensible/trained enough to detect phase (I don't know if it is, probably isn't right?), then a 4ms delay would mean being in antiphase to the expected response at ~125Hz, that is the B2 key.
[0] https://br.steinway.com/pianos/steinway/todays-steinway/spir...
Firstly, even if the sensing delay could be reduced to a couple of milliseconds, which I believe is perfectly plausible, I doubt whether the velocity of traditional solenoids could be controlled with enough accuracy to replicate the velocity exactly. They are on/off devices, so the only way to moderate the velocity is by rapidly changing the voltage by extremely small amounts. This I am supposing must need a feedback loop with a very complex function to account for different types of mechanical friction, electromagnetic impedance along the solenoid's coil and other factors that associate the voltage with the instantaneous velocity.
Alternatively, one could use a stepper-motor style linear actuator, which would certainly be very precise and could theoretically be powerful and fast enough to emulate a traditional piano's hammer. However, I have never seen such specialised stepper motors advertised, nor one small enough to fit in an unmodified grand piano action.
All in all, I don't believe that Steinway's really do have that capability, and I suspect that, whatever their measuring accuracy is, the precision of the actuator itself is more like a crude correlation to a few dozen levels of force than the claimed hundreds of levels. Of course, they do have a very slick-looking player piano, and I suspect that it what really matters for their clientèle.
On to your second point, I'm pretty sure that 4ms would indeed not be detectable. By 10ms I think I would be able to hear it; maybe there are people who could hear a delay shorter than that. As for phase, you can definitely detect the relative phase of two identical tones, but since an acoustic piano has up to three different strings each with complex harmonics I'm not sure you could pick out the phase of any individual tone that easily. However, I will admit that I am tempted to try now! :)
It's just somebody's art project.
The rich sound of a real piano is created by acoustic chorusing, direct acoustic coupling between the various strings, and also by indirect coupling between the bridge, metal frame, and sound board. This works best when the strings are parallel and fairly close together, with some overlap in the bass.
The entire assembly is tuned acoustically to highlight some notes more than others - for example Steinways have a powerful bass but a relatively controlled mid-range which brings out the details of the playing. Other brands make other choices.
The design of the action - the playing feel - is not at all trivial.
And good luck designing practical damper pedals for a spiral piano.
It's more of a rich, full sound, more on the mellow side.
However, the extra low notes on their oversized concert grand do boom quite well. I have only been able to play one, though.
The extra keys below the 88 do go into bass-fart territory, though. (For those who don't know, Bosendorfer Imperials have 97 keys, the extra ones all going deeper into the low range).
1) Mann actually built the piano! No mere rendering, this guy got his hands dirty, did trial and error and reverse engineering and built something real.
2) The project wasn't merely aesthetic, it was in pursuit of seeing how a different build could affect the sound of the instrument
Professional pianist here. Undoubtedly the toy illumination concept may be useful to someone; that’s fine. But they seem to be positioning this as a bespoke high-end instrument. I’m confused.
But replacing the action with solenoids? The double-escapement action of the modern grand piano is a thing of beauty. Reliable and nuanced; it’s irreplaceable. The tactile feedback, repetition rate, and feel offered by a well-regulated action is so essential to refined pianistic technique.
I wish them well; but I won’t hold my breath waiting for this to materialize. I’m not sure it should. Undoubtedly there is room still to innovate in piano design. Beethoven himself was closely allied with designers and manufacturers of the day after all. But LEDs in the style of gaming computers and solenoids?
It certainly is an engineering marvel, but it is much heavier than an upright's action. Strong fingers required! :)
A baby grand isn't to be much louder (if louder at all) than an a full-size upright, but might still have less sympathetic vibration if the strings don't cross as much as they would on an upright. However, sympathetic vibration isn't necessarily undesirable; I'm convinced that the the opening bars of Schubert's Wanderer fantasy (D. 760) was composed deliberately to emphasise the effect.
Modern concert grands almost universally have the double-escapement action, which allows notes to be played very rapidly. That said, you only get the advantage of the massive leverage when starting from a state where the key is completely released, so all subsequent notes take a lot more force to be made at the same volume as the first. There are some uprights with double-escapement, but the are plenty that don't have it either... a 3/4-size 'spinet' a hundred years old is unlikely to possess such a refined mechanism (along with missing loads of strings, to add insult to injury).
The latter half of your comment I would agree with entirely; I would enumerate the factors like this:
1. The hammer falls down to its resting position with grands. This allows it to return to its resting position faster, at the expense of greater force required to move the hammer.
2. The double-escapement action of grands allows the hammers to strike again without the key having been fully released. This increases the maximum rate at which the same note can be played in succession, but again at the expense of greater force required because of the lack of leverage when not using the whole distance of the action.
3. Double-escapement mechanisms can be found on uprights, but these are different from the traditional grand action and are exceedingly rare. (From a cursory search online, the only such upright I can find currently for sale is the Bechstein Concert 8.)
These are usually recessed in a hole in the side of the key.
Typically you'll be around 50 grams, no matter whether upright or grand. But the action is substantially different in construction and that can have all kinds of effects on key response once it is moving. You can test this for yourself with some reference weights.
A '60' would be on the heavy side, a 40 or even lower would feel very light.
Black keys tend to be a bit lighter (and are differently positioned on the cantilever) due to their shorter length of travel so it all works out roughly the same in the end. Treble keys tend to be weighted slightly lighter than bass keys.
I don't have an action in pieces right now so I can't make a picture of what the side of a key looks like, but I'll see if I can't find one online.
Edit: so, I've found an image:
https://creativemarket.com/product/15418366-White-wooden-key....
If you look at the sides of the key you see two gray circles, those are lead weights, and they, more than anything determine the balance and weight of the key. Note that there also is a weight on the near side of the key! The weights on bass keys will be a bit larger at the back than for the treble side, and the hammers are also a bit heavier. You can still tune a lot in the action, but another major factor is simply friction. If there is lots of play in the pin that the key rides on it can make the action feel 'loose' all the way to unplayable (because the key will rub the keys next to it), and if it rides too tight (or has been twisted out of true) it will work so hard against the felt that you need a lot of force to overcome the friction. This all shows up as perceived weight, but it really isn't. It's just friction.
Piano actions are fascinating, apparently simple but they are really small works of art for each and every key. All the parts have to work 'just so' and they then still have to be regulated to get a really even action. One really nasty little thing that can happen is that the pins in the various action bits are corroded, this can cause lots of friction in ways that can be hard to track down to any specific linkage.
There are extremes, a famous concert pianist (for the life of me I can't remember which one) for instance had his piano set for super light touch, so light that others found his instrument(s) unplayable. And on the other end there is the mechanical church organ, with keys so heavy that playing anything at all turns into a physical work-out. Talk about 'strong fingers required', you need to be in top physical shape for that.
As for organs on the other hand, I used to play a Victorian frankenstein^W 'hybrid' tracker organ in my local church (sadly now closed). The keys on that poor organ were certainly a work-out for the fingers, and of course got stiffer the more stops that were pulled out.
I personally believe that it is valuable to maintain these now-rare tracker organs for their historical merit - they were arguably the most complex machines ever created before the electronic digital computer took that title. However, when it comes to music, I'm not a purist: there is nothing about the stiffness of the keys inherent to the sound of a pipe organ, so I'm all for pneumatic control. Electronic keys also work well if care is taken to reduce the overall latency, as witness by the success of the Wurlitzer theatre organs.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37054825
[2]: 'Hybrid' this instance means an original nineteenth-century tracker mechanism, combined with a 20th century blower and an electronic organ invisibly integrated into the instrument. Actually, not so invisibly, as it frequently malfunctioned. There is also record of a pneumatic action somewhere, but I haven't located it myself.
Ah, I've found the pianist: it's Horowitz (I mistakenly thought it was Rubinstein), read here for some fascinating bits of piano lore:
As a professional pianist, have you ever played this kind of instrument? How good are "weighted" keyboards? How good are electric (or, why not, pneumatic) actuators in stringed instruments?
I think the LEDs are a nice option to have. Piano bars sometimes have big mirrors suspended over the stage so you can see the player’s hands; this is a much more flexible way to achieve a similar effect.
The solenoids though…. Oof. To your point, pressing a piano key is so much more than a binary on/off. Digital keyboards are quite good, but still different. It should certainly be possible to make a version of this that works, but (1) binary solenoids ain’t it and (2) the result would be fundamentally different from a traditional piano.
I wonder how well the sound board would resonate.
I wonder if you could improve it by stringing the bass strings right across behind the treble strings. You could fit longer strings that way.
The hammers get further down the strings as you go. That's kind of normal but it's a bit different to normal here. Might affect the sound in some interesting way.
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Here are some more links if you'd like to see other "radical redesigns of the piano" (and these ones have actually been built):
Kavins 450i: https://klavins-pianos.com/products/model-450i/
Janko keyboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard
Seaboard RISE 2: https://roli.com/products/seaboard/rise2
Expressive E Osmose: https://www.expressivee.com/2-osmose
Chichi Rocking Piano: https://www.facebook.com/chichi.rockingpiano/
Lyra Flugel piano: https://www.reddit.com/r/piano/comments/gu9lu9/lyra_flugel_a...
I suspect this sort of expanded polyphonic aftertouch will become commonplace in the future - my first exposure to the world of synths was via the relatively cheap/affordable arturia minifreak which provides poly aftertouch which seemingly until recently was rarely available or was v expensive. Seems like a very natural progression for keyboard hardware - although using the extra modulation effectively seems to be lagging.
The Osmose seems to have spent a lot of effort on this aspect. Curious how you use it? As a live solo instrument? Looks like trying to exploit an instrument like this using a traditional DAW would be a nightmare.
The presets make really good use of the poly-aftertouch, which is way more comfortable than on my Hydrasynth Explorer. For pitch bend/vibrato the Osmose relies on the sideways key motion.
Personally I'm a long-time piano player just lately getting into synths and recording, so I'm not sure how I'll use it exactly. But I'm envisioning uses similar to lead electric guitars, or expressive acoustic instruments. Or dialing down the pitch bend sensitivity and using it like Vangelis used the CS-80.
Not being familiar with piano configurations and sizes I was wondering indeed how one could squeeze the "real piano" strings into such a small space. Apparently you can't :-)
Seems to be a form over function exercise.
I would love to see different key arrangements connected to regular hammers and strings, allowing for a wider span for each hand, opening a new era of virtuosism. Something akin to the buttons of a chromatic accordion [0], but with rectangular piano-like keys. We are used to the common arrangement of white and black keys centered around the major C scale, but this is just an arbitrary choice.
In the sense that it doesn't use superconductors instead of strings, or some novel isomorphic layout, yes.
But, were it possible to actually be built, it still qualifies as a radical redesign -- just of the piano built, not of it's keyboard.
I don't see a word about novel designs that allow fitting the mechanisms that are normally spread along the keyboard, with ample room along and below each string and vertically moving parts, into the small hub of the spiral, with oblique and all different movement directions; making this thing sound as well as a vertical piano with similar strings should be considered wishful thinking.
Making those three rendered pedals do something seems also especially challenging.
There is non outside kids keyboards, because piano keys are sized just right.
Pianists for alternatively sized keyboards https://paskpiano.org/latest-news/ Videos showing alternative sizes: https://youtu.be/TfdNxbHl_40?list=PLHBn-VaaOCGcfrUsklI1GztxT...
As the video says, it's always more about the ability to stretch than size.
When you go for narrower keys for inability to stretch you lose fluency as your fingers are as thick as the other guy's.
Fuck this very idea from the bottom of my heart. I'm a grown-ass man, fully functional in all aspects of life, who can't reach an octave comfortably, just like most female players and a lot of Asian males. The piano keyboard is objectively too big for most players in the world, period.
Unlike size, stretching can be improved by exercise by A LOT. I use size S (male) gloves myself, yet I can reach C-E on the piano and the 11th fret from a 5th fret barre on a 25.5 scale guitar.
For me, I don't care about ultimate tone, or better access to the highest notes.
I simply want to enjoy playing as much as possible, and make my friends smile while we share the experience. Shorter-scaled guitars are, for me, part of what lets that happen.
Lately, I’m tending to think otherwise.
If narrower keyboards were to start being manufactured, people with longer fingers would just write arrangements with wider chords for these keys—and people with shorter fingers would be none the better. We cannot demand progressively smaller and smaller keyboards forever.
Furthermore, upon reflection I realized that for some techniques, especially those involving wide staccato jumps, larger keys are actually beneficial even for people with shorter fingers—as you throw hands around, larger keys provide more forgiving “landing pads”, allowing for higher speed than if you had to be precise so as not to accidentally trigger a neighbouring key. In fact, I suspect smaller keys would benefit one or two specific scenarios (e.g., a wide one-hand chord), while being detrimental to other techniques.
All in all, I do not believe it is a handicap. Pick arrangements that work for you. Adapt arrangements to your physique. Narrower range chords do not even remotely imply unimpressive arrangements! Yes, if there is something you want to but cannot physically play, that sucks—but we all have to pick our battles; I have seen pianists with less reach than me demonstrate mind-blowing technique that is beyond my capabilities, and by now I guess will be so forever.
And yes, there's a decent bit of "artist's statement" patois in the article, but that's sort of expected from designers.
If you want only one fingering you'll need to use a regular tuning:
It has LEDs on the strings; so perhaps it also has pickups, and is designed to be plugged into an amp?