Speaking piano

Friend of mine just posted this on facebook. The video's quite old but I searched and couldn't find a thread about it.

Amazing stuff, some German guy managed to simplify the formant frequencies of human speech sufficiently to allow a normal 88 key piano to "speak". Of course a piano, being tuned as it is, doesn't have the nuance of pitch to sound totally clear so subtitles are needed if you want to understand it- still a really interesting demonstration of how harmony and timbre are essentially the same thing!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCPjK4nGY4&feature=player_embedded

edit: guy's austrian actually i think

SPARRKYYYY !

that's quite mental - in a good way.

  On 7/4/2011 at 11:06 AM, mcbpete said:

SPARRKYYYY !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po86G0svsIo

Wow. That must have taken forever to tune that thing correctly.

If you search youtube you'll find a recording of the piano "reading" a letter Schoenberg wrote to, I believe, a conductor who made alterations to a score of his and chewing him out for it. I remember it being a pretty vicious letter.

Also, I believe someone at IRCAM recently demonstrated a piece of software that breaks a soundfile into the frequency bands and assists in arranging them for an orchestra, ala spectralist musicians. It was named after a flower of some sort... Orchid, I believe.

Ah yes. Here we are: Orchidee.

thats totally awesome. I wish I could use this stuff for composing