Reproducing a piano performance
George F. Litterst, Mike Bates · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1997
There are many ways to store a piano performance for later reproduction, each of which lacks a complete and consistent definition. A composer typically notates a score for a pianist to play from—leaving many decisions to the whim of the performer. A pianist practices and commits hand and foot movements to memory—none of which produces a consistent result. A recording engineer captures the vibrations of sound for reproduction on a variety of playback systems—each of which plays back with individual characteristics which, from the listener’s point of view, depart significantly from the experience of the live performance. The Disklavier piano offers a different approach which is designed to capture and play back a performance accurately by recreating the original performance on an actual piano. The information which drives the disklavier can be output to a computer in order to display performance data and to facilitate an analysis of the performance.