The player piano has come, oddly, full circle.

Peer into the editing pane of a music sequencer, and what you see is an abstracted virtual player piano. The editing views are even dubbed “Piano Roll” views (sometimes officially so). The MIDI protocol by which most music devices and apps communicate is itself a kind of port of the piano roll’s paradigm to a digital implementation, with fixed pitch and durations spanning time in an endless loop.

So it’s fitting that Dan Deacon is busy in the studio, feeding a player piano with MIDI and computers in order to make it play layers of unplayable music. The technical work is significant, to be sure, but on another level it’s natural that the computer would speak to the player piano in such terms. These are distant technologies bridged by a common understanding of how to simplify and reproduce music. The process speaks to some of the limitations in the way in which computers typically relate to musical instruments. We may be at the end of the road for this century-old way of thinking about mechanized music. But, extended to the near-breaking point, the maximalist texture that results is all the more beautiful.

Thanks to Jason Bergman for the tip.

Pitchfork TV: Dan Deacon in the Studio [Player Piano]

Maker Profile – Computer Making Music on Make: television from make magazine on Vimeo.

Make:Television has done a really lovely piece on CCRMA, the research center at Stanford University that works on problems ranging from acoustics and sound to musical instrument design. CCRMA is really just one microcosm of the whole music tech making scene around the world – a lot of increasingly beyond the walls of academia. But what a microcosm it is: I don’t think it’s understatement to say this is just the kind of institution a lot of us dream of. Among the highlights from the MAKE video that I could pick up:

• Ge Wang, professor and creator of ChucK programming language and certain popular ocarina-themed iPhone apps, and Stanford Laptop Orchestra director
• Carr Wilkerson: Electronic “Rub Board”(?) with a nice accompanying Pd synth patch
• A very nice Max/MSP app that everyone seems to be using for signal analysis
• Edgar Berdahl: a one-handed drum that “hits back”
• Nicholas Bryan building the legendary hemispheric speaker (incidentally, no one seems to be able to tell me who invented that)
• A giant interactive musical playground, with a Wii-powered teeter-totter (with one somewhat silly patch, and then another very lovely bowed-sounding patch)

Thanks to patospurlock on Twitter for the tip. I know at least some of you CCRMA students read this site, so feel free to chime in and identify your colleagues.

The featured Feedback Piano project is a hybrid with a bit of acoustical design (a piano), electronics/recording (mics), and digital/computer design (the Max patch that completes the circle). The results are really striking, and while it’s a lot less portable than a convolution reverb, it’s certainly very different having an actual piano into which you can play your saxophone.

Make followed up with directions on the Feedback Piano (please use a truly broken piano, thanks!) and we’ve got some video, as well:

In case you haven’t seen it, Nine Inch Nails has taken to the multi-touch Lemur control surface and More Buttons Than Thou top-end Monome. There’s a short video of an experiment combining the two with a real (MIDI-enabled) Yamaha piano. It’s just under a minute, but already evocative — I’m not entirely sure why Alessandro is manning the touchpad on his laptop given all this hardware around, but the cascading patterns on the Monome suggest both LED art and a digital take on a player piano.

More videos on the official NIN YouTube page, which has recently launched a visuals contest for interpreting music from the new album.

But lest you think you need all that pricey hardware to make use of an unusual tool, look no further than MilkyTracker. Platform wars end here: MT runs on Windows (95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, 2003, and Vista), Mac OS X (PowerPC, Intel), Linux (x86, 64-bit x86, PowerPC), Linux game/mobile platforms (GP2X, ARM), UNIX (FreeBSD x86), and Windows CE. Wowsa. And it’s all yours for a donation, if you can spare one. Heck, there are even video tutorials on the site.

But geekdom aside, I love that MilkyTracker ninjas can make so much music out of so little. Without taking on the aesthetic style here, if that’s not your thing, it’s a reminder that economical choices with your tech can produce all kinds of different sounds. So, maybe rather than loading that preset, try to construct a drum kit out of basic waveforms.

Enjoy!

Video by extrabajs; for some reflections on MilkyTracking, see our friend thumbuki — who, speaking of doing more with less, is working with an OLPC. Economical hardware use is back in an age of power efficiency and computing beyond the deep-pocketed “first world” — and everything old is new again:

Milky Tracker @ thumbuki

What? MilkyTracker is fanning the flames of a platform war with the Atari ST? No worries: MaxYmizer is a newly updated (yep, you read that right) tracker tool for the Atari platform. Polyphonic MIDI input and MIDI clock output means it should easily integrate with your existing studio. See the Digital Tools blog for full details.

Imagine every single piece of gear you have on your wish list. Then imagine a baby grand piano, lacquered in white. Then imagine — you know, for the sake of practicality — you want to use the piano as a projection surface. And sound system. And then imagine you just mash all those ideas into one gear-packed baby grand piano, and you’ve got the beautifully freakish BabyGrandMaster:

Baby Grand Master

It’s not just a gimmicky DJ piano. It’s a “video instrument”, blending visuals and audio. The last time we saw something somewhat like this was the keyboard with PC Miko, though since that’s just a Windows PC packed in a keyboard, only the marketing concept in principle made it a “VJ/DJ” product versus, well, a PC in a keyboard. And, of course, the Baby Grand Master starts to make the Miko look oddly affordable and practical.

This isn’t just some random tinkerer, either. It’s the creation of a veteran of the Emergency Broadcast Network group, as seen on Create Digital Motion today, meaning if you want to add missiles, it’s probably possible.

The specs:

One last minute addition to CDM’s wildly unrealistic and holiday gift guide that’s late enough to qualify as the post-holiday guide (that’s its unofficial name):

Legendary Artist Peter Max Paints Baldwin Piano for Gibson Foundation

Granted, not a digital instrument, but I still love acoustic pianos. Add a Moog PianoBar or a full-featured MIDI retrofit, and this is basically my dream instrument (and I’ve always been partial to Baldwins). And Peter Max remains a terrific visual visionary.

You can help realize someone’s holiday wishes by giving to a charitable organization like the Gibson Foundation. They do some really good work, including helping musicians recover from Hurricane Katrina. What worthier cause than helping give music to the world?