Re: Talking piano

[Matthew McCabe <mccabem@xxxxxxx>]

hi all -

spectral investigation is quite common in electroacoustic music -- the 
sine wave example of the Frost poem that Ani just sent reminded me of 
Charles Dodge's "Speech Songs", made at the Columbia/Princeton electronic 
music center in the early 70's:

http://www.last.fm/music/Charles+Dodge/_/.........When+I+Am+With+You

if you can synthesize speech with a bank of oscillators, you can probably 
do it with a piano too... you would just have to make sacrifices when it 
came to organizing overtone series and realizing noise components.

for example, in the German video, hard consonants "t" and "d" are all 
rendered using the top-most note of the piano, which i'm sure most 
musicians would agree doesn't really make much of a pitch, it's more of a 
"smack" :)  a piano also isn't capable of making the "shh" sound.  perhaps 
he should put some little scrapers on servo motors and rig up some 
percussion equipment.

i wonder if a Disklavier would be capable of doing this ?

-m






On Fri, 9 Oct 2009, Tony Miller wrote:
> The demo is real.  The Wein Modern is Venice's contemporary music
> festival.  3sat is German public television.  Peter Ablinger, who
> created the MIDI controlled mechanical device that strikes the piano
> keys, is a well known Austrian contemporary music composer.
>
> -Tony

---
matthew mccabe <mccabem@xxxxxxx>
visiting assistant professor / music tech :: columbus state university
ph.d. candidate :: music composition :: uf college of fine arts
lab member :: reilly cognition and language lab :: uf phhp
http://plaza.ufl.edu/mccabem/     http://www.euph0r1a.net/