Triggering a Yamaha Disklavier with the Samchillian
On June 6, 2005 I brought Samchillian into the NYU Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions and with it I triggered a Yamaha Disklavier, which is essentially a modern-day player piano.
More specifically, it is a Yamaha piano (a grand in this case) fitted with solenoids, so that one can save a live performance on the piano to disk and replay it, more or less exactly the way it was played. And, of interest to me, one can send MIDI to it live and have the piano keys respond, which is what I did.
Tim Cramer brought a DAT recorder and a stereo mic and made a nice recording. He also played a duet with me: he played live piano while i triggered the same piano with Samchillian. We also videotaped - some short clips appear below:
Quicktime Movies (Samchillian playing the Disklavier in real-time):
instant contemporary classical
Overall the experience was a great success. We had hoped to record MIDI to disk and play it back in order to avoid recording the keyclicking of Samchillian, but it was good enough for me to step behind the curtain to eliminate those noises.
Quite a good learning experience for me - I could see with a little more experience I could really figure out the interesting things to play on this system.
Special Thanks to:
- Robert Rowe (Associate Director of the Dept.) for allowing it to happen and setting us up in the room
- Gideon D'Arcangelo of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU for making the introduction to Prof. Rowe for me.
- Tim Cramer for making the recording and playing the duet.