Thanks to the good work of Deborah Bradley-Kramer (our Director of Music
Performance Programs at Columbia), we managed to receive a gift of several
Yamaha Disklaviers,
essentially computer-controlled player-piano-like entities. I hadn't thought
of doing much with one until Jaime Madell proposed a May concert
of DK pieces, so I figured it might be a chance to try some other
technological tricks as well. Using "jitter", a digital image processing
language (written in part by CMC-er
Luke DuBois),
I set up a system to track my hand location above the piano keyboard
using a digital camera. All of the piano "playing" in this piece
is done using this system. I don't ever actually touch the piano
keys themselves.
The fun part is that this allowed me to become a SUPER piano player,
not only better than I could ever be in real life, but also capable of
playing chords with 20 or 30 fingers.
The performance recording has a bit of distortion on it. I plan to make
a 'studio' recording soon. The system also messed up a little during the
premiere performance of the
piece and mis-tracked my hands at times (especially towards the ending),
but it all ended well enough.