look-ma-no-hands




hardware:   Apple PowerBook G4/OSX, Yamaha Disklavier, Panasonic digital camera
software:   RTcmix, max/msp ([rtcmix~]). jitter

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.