Show HN: Homemade robot playing piano concert in SF (7/26)

1 point

10 months ago

Figured there are probably some folks on here that might be interested in coming to a robot piano concert at Gray Area in SF this Saturday night (7/26). More comprehensive technical write up to come (eventually) but the show is by LA composer Deru (https://deru.la) and features 3 robot/player pianos that sit over the top of traditional upright pianos and are controlled live over USB MIDI by way of an ESP32-S3.

The story of how it all came about is kinda long but Ben (Deru) recorded an album (We Will Live On: https://deru.bandcamp.com/album/we-will-live-on), during covid on a Yamaha Disklavier (the album will be performed as part of the concert). To try and work out how we could actually tour the album we found a community of homebrew player piano folks that started with Brandon Switzer's work (https://github.com/bbswitzer/pianoproject) which led to a Discord group (https://discord.gg/vE9uPg2y) and then to Josh Phillips's work evolving it into an over the top player (https://github.com/japhillips87/player_piano).

We followed Josh's PCB designs (with some modifications due to component availability) upgraded the chip driving them to be an ESP32-S3 dev board so we could turn it into a USB MIDI peripheral, and went about building more pianos (so we could do the concert with three pianos).

Here's some pretty average footage of the rehearsal we did last week where we got the first one working nicely and then all three working together driven over some USB extenders.

1 piano 'tuned': https://youtu.be/tD1tcXoxsiw 3 pianos working together for the first time: https://youtube.com/shorts/gr1l6a6vt28

The concert will have three pianos, two guitar amps and a couple of metal resonators all performing in the round and should sound wonderful. Please come along or ask any questions below to me. All going well there will be a larger tour to follow.