Self-playing pianos aren’t exactly new. In fact some of them look and sound pretty convincing and have the keys and pedals moving up and down as if someone was sitting at the piano playing the notes themselves. However if there’s one criticism about such instruments is that they lack the human touch.
While they might be able to replicate a song note-for-note, musicians will probably tell you that it just isn’t the same. This is where Steinway’s latest piano, the Spirio, comes in. Steinway is a company known to many pianists as being one of the best brands available for pianos, so for the company to create such hi-tech instrument is actually rather surprising.
That being said the Spirio is not just your run of the mill self-playing piano. The instrument comes with an iPad that runs an app preloaded with 1,700 songs. New songs will sync with the iPad every week and the tablet will pair with the piano via Bluetooth. Now this is where it gets interesting – the Steinway Spirio’s hardware and software measures the velocity of the piano’s hammer hitting the string in 1,020 increments, noting its location and speed at 800 times a second.
What this does is that it is able to capture pretty much every subtle nuance and pressure emitted by the pianist at any given time. The result should more or less replicate the feel given off by an actual human player, versus a computer simply hammering out the same notes. Now it does sound like a novel idea but as noted by Wired, this is an interesting concept as it could potentially allow listeners to enjoy the works of great pianists as if that pianist was in their living room giving them a private performance. Of course this will not come cheap as the Spirio has been priced upwards of $110,000 – yikes!
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