TransAcoustic Technology

Aside from the elegant and innovative sound production mechanism, which will enchant many, there's not a lot that you can't get with a middle range digital keyboard and a reasonable amp, all of which has been round for many years. Then you don't need to pay $$$ for an instrument removalist every time you shift house.

I abandoned using a keyboard to generate sounds years ago, now it just sends out a digital stream that goes through external processing to a tone generator (mine is Yamaha, bet some of the sounds in that featured device are the same ones).

Unbelievable that such a pointless "technology" exits. This achieves, essentially, nothing. Like turn a real, huge wooden piano into something that has already existed for 20-30 years. Pretty much the only reason for using a monstrously large real piano, is keyboard feel, and original acoustic sound. The keyboard feel was, essentially, solved a long time ago with electronic keyboards, and excepting the golden ears boys, so was the acoustic sound.

Kevin Aylward

ssentially, nothing. Like turn a real, huge wooden piano into something th at has already existed for 20-30 years. Pretty much the only reason for us ing a monstrously large real piano, is keyboard feel, and original acoust ic sound. The keyboard feel was, essentially, solved a long time ago with electronic keyboards, and excepting the golden ears boys, so was the acous tic sound.

I'm dubious about this statement. I've used Roland keyboards for some twent y years now - a Roland HP 330e for the last decade or so - and while they d o the job, the proprioceptive feedback from the keyboard isn't great. I pla yed better on my Dutch piano teacher's German Steinway than I ever did on t he Roland 330e, despite practicing on the latter every day, and playing the former only once a week.

spells out what's seems to be going on.

As Caroline Palmer pointed out - and documented - in her Ph.D. thesis, pian o notes sounds are timed to about 10msec, so the finger driving the keys to produce the sound of the appropriate intensity at the right moment has to allow for the time it takes to push the key down hard enough to get the ham mer moving at the right speed to produce the loudness desired, and the time it takes after the hammer has disengaged from the piano key and moved on t o bang the piano string.

The fourteen-to-nineteen moving parts in a real piano key mechanism feed ba ck rather more information to the fingers than the weighed and sprung actio n of an electric piano.

It would be easy enough to build a stack of 88 printed linear motors to fit under the keys of an electric piano and generate the appropriate forces to keep the fingers informed - I think I've worked out a practicable scheme - but isn't a particularly cheap approach. My programmed stalled when I had to find a cheap mechanical drawing program to let me specify the dimension of the stationary steel plate to carry the fixed neodymium-iron magnets tha t would provide the magnetic fields for the moving coils to react against. There is a Linux program that ought to do the job, but I couldn't get it to do anything useful, and lost interest.

There are commercial linear motor packages which come close to the speeds a nd forces, but every last one of them is too wide. The dimensions of the hu man finger and arm dictate 14mm key spacing. Easy enough to accommodate wit h a special purpose design, but not with anything off-shelf that I could fi nd.

Brent Gillespie built his proof-of-principle machine with linear motors sal vaged out of dead hard disk drives, but you really need a micro-stepped lin ear stepping motor to get the force and travel required in the space availa ble.

Yamaha cheat by using a complete mechanical keyboard mechanism, and add ele ctronic sensors to get spot-on speed and timing information. It does seem t o work really well, but the classical mechanism does wear and Yamaha's solu tions isn't exactly elegant.

Unfortunately, I'm one of those "golden ears boys" and most music production sound 'quality' is not, just disappointing, sometimes actually painful to listen to. Best comparison is to just toss a cat up under your arm and pull its tail.

I can hear a smattering of performance and comment on the origin/quality, ie. upon walking through the room and hearing some TV performance, I said that they should tune the treble in their Steinway & Sons Concert Grand and on a closeup of the performer's hands read the logo on the piano [wife didn't believe me at first], or simply, "There's NO way to improve a Yamaha sound, it just 'is'" to again see the Yamaha logo on the piano. Keyboards? sigh, they're just an interesting 'input' devoce for MIDI to control a lot of 'sounds', but that's about it. to me.