Piano

Would-be Liberaces could soon be wearing a keyboard on their hands in the form of the Piano Gloves. Created by Scott Garner, the prototype gloves let the wearer play a piano on any surface via buttons on the tips of the fingers. Audio is processed via an Arduino microcontroller wired to the buttons and presently the software can be set to play a major scale or ten semitones, which would limit the gloves to playing tunes comprised of ten or less notes, but Scott is looking at ways to expand the repertoire. Read More

Point the Piano and Violin Learning Pen from Gigiway at notation in a music book and it will either play the piece through its built-in speaker or repeat and re-repeat a chosen passage and tell you what all those complicated-looking symbols mean. Budding musicians can slow down the playback speed until they are ready to play at full pelt, activate the digital metronome and even compare tones to make sure their chosen instrument is in tune. Read More

Remember back in the 80s when Steve Vai used to make his guitar "talk" to David Lee Roth? That video clip is here, but be warned, Roth's bare butt peeking through the holes in his leather chaps is one of the LEAST offensive things in the clip. It seems things have become more refined in the last 20-odd years. This fascinating clip shows how Austrian composer Peter Ablinger has programmed a mechanically-actuated piano to reproduce recorded human speech. And yes, you can somehow understand it. Read More

Have you ever dreamed of playing piano but the thought of committing yourself to years of grueling lessons fills you with dread? Then you just might be interested in the Concert Hands system, where your hands are gently guided back and forth along a track positioned just in front of the keys, and pulses prompt your fingers as each note is displayed on a screen in front of you. According to the developers, the technology will have you playing fluently in a few short days. Read More

Yamaha’s new Avant Grand digital piano fuses twenty-first century technology with Yamaha’s more than a century of piano-crafting experience. The result is a digital piano that mimics the touch of an acoustic piano by using the same key, level, and hammer mechanisms of an acoustic piano combined with special embedded speakers to recreate the feel of an acoustic piano's keys to the player's hands. Read More

Today at MacWorld 2009, Apple unveiled the next feature to be added to their entry-level music production application GarageBand, that is sure to capitalize on the mass of budding musicians created by games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero. The software ships with nine included lessons for the guitar and piano, and an integrated store that allows you to buy "Artist Lessons" from famous musicians such as Sting and John Fogerty. Read More

March 3, 2007 - Parents rejoice! Finally a video game that you can give to your kids with no immediate hesitation or eventual regrets. The results of long hours spent in front of the game aren't just honed reflexes and hand-to-eye coordination, but the gift of fluency in the most beautiful and timeless language of all...music. Read More

February 7, 2005 The steady march of digital technology continues to sweep all before it and the smallest member of the free-reed musical instrument family, the accordion, looks set to be next with the release this week of the Roland FR-5 and FR-7 V-Accordions. Based on Roland's proprietary Physical Behavior Modeling (PBM) technology, these lightweight, reedless digital accordions put dozens of ultra-realistic instruments at the player's fingertips and take one of the original musical instruments into the digital age. Read More