I'd like to also hear how loud the mechanical noise of the machine playing the piano would be. Does the left hand work harder with the heavier keys? What would the hands be mounted to?
I play the piano and I think MIDI does not have enough parameters to describe an acoustic piano. It's not just a single strike velocity that determines each sound. Where you play within the double escapement, how far down you hit the key, they all change the sound a bit.
That said though there are better MIDI synthesizers, e.g. https://www.modartt.com/ They still don't match an acoustic. I can tell the difference quite easily. I think a neural TTS retrained on piano data could do better.
Yes. The robot used in this study is Dexterous Hand from Shadow Robot. It's a real product, and costs around $200-300k (for a single hand).
Controlling a real robot using a RL policy (model) trained in a simulation environment is also doable. It's called "Sim2Real" and has been widely experimented in the last decade (with mixed success, though).
There's a video that shows the hand moving and it doesn't look like it would be fast enough for anything but relatively slow songs:
Each key (on a good piano) is weighted to have the same force requirements to be played. Of course varying forces can be used to achieve different decibels, but the curve is the same across the piano.
> Every single key on a grand piano keyboard is weighted differently. This is because the strings for each note are slightly thinner and shorter in the treble register, becoming thicker and longer towards the bass register. As a result, there is greater resistance when playing low notes than when playing high notes. In other words, a heavier touch is required in the left hand and a lighter touch in the right hand. To emulate this in a digital piano, the keys are often individually weighted, with the lower keys heavier than the higher ones — something that’s called graded weighting.
https://hub.yamaha.com/pianos/p-digital/a-quick-guide-to-wei...