It’s always nice to watch Glenn Gould play the piano. (Click the via link below to see all the other Goldberg Variations.)

(via Perverse Egalitarianism)

More sculptural drone awesomeness from Stephen Cornford: Extended Piano is

A kinetic sound sculpture. Two guitar strings are attached to two bass strings of an upright piano. Mechanised bows play the guitar strings, whose vibrations resonate sympathetically through the whole piano. The sound is entirely acoustic.

It’s a mesmerizing sculpture, and most exciting for me, it raises some interesting questions about what constitutes a piano: Can you have a piano without any keys or hammers? If you bow it, is it still a piano?

Dutch filmmaker Guido van der Werve built (had built?) this chess board/piano for his upcoming film “Nummer Twaalf.” It was played in a concert at the Marshall Chess Club with a nine-piece string orchestra last Friday, and there don’t seem to be any videos of it in action yet. The squares of the chess board function as keys (above the frame of the photo).

I assume that it is set up such that a chess game, which you could represent with chess notation as a novel kind of musical score. If so, that is awesome.

I’ll post the video link when it goes live (he supposedly has a trailer “coming soon” on his website).

(via NYTimes)

Not all of Thomas Edison’s inventions were as successful as the phonograph and the electric light. Apparently he also patented a “concrete piano,” with the idea that you could pour out just the shape you wanted.

Well, some folks took an upright and covered it in concrete. Video is apparently forthcoming (on YouTube and the Discovery Channel!), so for now you just get to admire a piano covered in wet cement.

(via Edison’s Concrete Piano)

More from Peter Ablinger (of the child-voiced piano): This time, he’s taken a letter from Schoenberg and done his piano-vocoder magic with it. (Basically running a spectrum analysis and using the keys of the piano to play back the frequency data, like a lo-res vocoder.) It seems like there are some extra notes in there too, perhaps a musical quote from Schoenberg? I’m not sure.

It’s much harder to decipher without subtitles than the other one, and even with the text, I had a hard time following along:

Mister:
You…. In spite of my protest,
you have published
Leibowitz’ performance
of my Ode to Napoleon
with a woman voice,
which I find
terrible.
(…behind the orchestra…)
I can only tell you now,
that you will
hear from me.
You will, I can tell you,
you will regret this act
severely.
I will
be busy to help you
to be ruined
by this
what I will do….
(Some of the instruments … in small….)
You are not only a bugger …
You are not only a man who disregards an artist’s wishes,
his artistic beliefs,
you are also a man
who does not care
to keep a contract.
You know that you signed a contract,
according to which
you have
to account to me regularly.
You must have sold
quite
a number of records
of my Violin Phantasy,
of the Trio,
and other things which you…
but which you issued without my consent.
I tell you,
you will hear from me also about these things,
and I hope it will cost you very much money.

Yours…

You can see a video with the text and audio lined up here [.mov link].

(via Rhizome)

This video is racing around the blogosphere right now, and for good reason.

Basically, a guy took a voice recording and analyzed the frequency spectrum, mapped that spectrum to a piano-playing device, and used the piano like an 88-band vocoder, playing the keys to recreate the frequencies of the sampled speech. If that doesn’t make any sense, watch the video. Whoa.

(via SynthGear)

A promo video for a documentary about avant-garde pianist Margaret Leng Tan. She plays the toy piano as if it were a real piano, and the real piano as if it were a big box of resonant strings. (As they both are.)

Some of the extended techniques shown in this video are so cool—I’ll definitely need to track this down eventually. (and did I mention she worked with John Cage for the last 11 years of his life?)

(inspired via the music of sound)

Surprise! Lady Gaga on the blog!

Well, really, this one is about her piano: a bubble-filled lucite upright. I don’t really have anything to say about it other than that it looks sort of ridiculous/awesome at the same time.

(And is, of course, an upright in shape only.)

This has interesting ramifications for my developing thesis ideas: How would you make a “piano” from scratch, if you could draw it? What decisions are effectively already made by the software that supports this?

(via a fantastic round-up over at CDM)

Someone from my class made a Facebook page for our sometimes piano.