4 ms·
How much control do you have with the solenoids, and the hammers? Is it just control of the velocity of strike, or is it possible to have positional control of
by FatalLogic 6y ago
How much control do you have with the solenoids, and the hammers? Is it just control of the velocity of strike, or is it possible to have positional control of the hammer?
If you could control the position, maybe you can create some interesting tonal effects that a human pianist could not achieve, by holding the hammer close to the string to partially damp it
(Similar to what guitarists can do)
- jacquesm 6y agoPositional control of the keys (not the hammers) is possible but the solenoids get very hot. Strike velocity is not proportional, I will have to add some filtering to ensure that loud passages don't break a hammershank. As for the tonal effects, you can't really manipulate a piano hammer like that through the action, and this mechanism still uses the normal action the way it is intended, only it strikes from below the pivot rather than above, so at the back of the key. The whole function of the piano action is to give a uniform response to uniform input so the hammer can only describe a particular arc with a speed relative to the force with which the key is struck. You can't 'freeze' the hammer at the top of that arc, it will just fall back down until it gets caught by the back-checks. What you can do and what would be impossible with just one pianist and just your fingers is to strike key combinations that would be otherwise impossible. For instance to make a chord that uses more than the normal number of fingers or that would require extreme contortions or more than two hands.
- FatalLogic 6y agoThen you could make some interesting effects by using each human key strike to trigger extra keys, such as one or two octaves higher or lower, or something more colorful like a note one fifth higher at reduced velocity, or time delayed perhaps edit - just noticed that it seems you hadn't yet been able to get the key sensors working, only the output
- jacquesm 6y agoChurch organs have such functionality, typically limited to activating octaves higher and lower than the rank played. Quite impressive given that that all works mechanically. And yes, that would require input, but I will be working on that next and I can already play using a digital keyboard on the piano (which gives a very eerie effect), and that way I can do such stuff.
- rzzzt 6y agoThe Windows 3.1-era Band-in-a-box had a feature (and probably still has, if that software is still around) that allowed playing along a pre-programmed chord progression in different styles, which always produced a harmony that matched the current chord with a a single key press. You could play in the style of eg. Erroll Garner, even if you only knew how the "bare" melody of the song goes.
- catblast 6y agoThere's a relatively old FOSS "band-in-a-box" program: https://www.mellowood.ca/mma/ https://www.mellowood.ca/mma/
- jacquesm 6y agoNeat example of this (someone posted this as a response on Twitter): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvMW71BJofc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvMW71BJofc
- davio 6y agoThat was amazing "AI" for the 1990s. It would play never-ending bebop solos that were pretty legit. The author must have been a well-versed musician and programmed in the standard licks from the jazz vocabulary.
- bondarchuk 6y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPG-VhU6Kiw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPG-VhU6Kiw You might like this.