Paper: Robotic Piano Player Making Pianos Talk

Abstract

The overall vision of a piano which can talk, a piano that produces understandable speech playing notes with a robotic piano player has been developed as artwork over the last decade. After successfully transcribing recorded ambient sound for piano and ensembles, the outcome of this mapping was applied by the composer Peter Ablinger in his artwork, which explores the auditory perception in the tradition of artistic phenomenalistsfootnote{phenomenalist in the sense of the work done by Alvin Lucier, who himself described him as phenomenalist, which is not a scientist, but uses phenomenas as a material for his art.}. For this vision a robotic piano player has been developed to play the result from the mapping of voice recordings, by reconstructing the key features of the analyzed spectrum stream, so that a voice can be imagined and roughly recognized. This paper is a report on the artistic research, mentioning different solutions. The output as artworks will be referenced.

Paper see: http://smc2011.smcnetwork.org/docs/SMC2011ProceedingsFinal.pdf