Haptic Augmentation of the Hybrid Piano

Abstract

One of the most vital feedback systems that has been embedded in musicians for centuries is that of physical response. In the same way that auditory information is available and used throughout a performance, a musician will continuously reassess their playing by making use of not only their specialised sensorimotor skills, but also the tangible feedback that is relayed to them through the body of the instrument. This paper discusses approaches to the development of an augmented instrument, namely the hybrid piano, which focuses on the notion of performance as perceptually guided action. While the acoustic component of the sound energy of the augmented instrument is created within the real-world interactions between hammers, resonating strings, and the soundboard, the digital sonic events cannot be located in a similar palpable source. By exploring notions of multimodality and haptic feedback, the ongoing processes of human action and perception within instrumental performance can be maintained for the player, whilst arguably, also enhancing the experience for the listener.

Keywords:

• Vibrotactile Feedback
• Enaction
• Performance
• Augmented Instruments

Notes

[1] See Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1999) for a description of the various stages of skill development. Even at the expert stage, the performer will make use of their acquired embodied knowledge as they instinctively play by feel.

[2] This will be shown to be of importance in the next section, with regard to implementing haptic feedback.

[3] Phrase length was determined by setting a maximum period of silence between notes before a new phrase was registered.

[4] In all my works involving the hybrid piano, I am the sole performer, but I refer to ‘the performer’ here, and elsewhere in this work, in the third person, to emphasise the application of these ideas to the more general case of performance.

[5] www.novint.com/index.php/novintfalcon.

[6] www.steim.org.

[7] Although it is beyond the scope of this paper, the vibrotactile system was also used as a method of communication between two improvisers, each playing an augmented instrument (one of which was the hybrid piano) (see Hayes & Michalakos, 2012, for details).