Siri Plays a Grand Piano With Some Help From AirPlay and Yamaha

Cool an Apple Express!

I would have given up my favorite bike, bat and swimming rights to have one of those so my Mom would hear music coming from our living room while I was out a window playing with my friends.

Now if only it would have worked for my weekly lesson with Miss Stanley, a true wicked witch, who would have wondered wtf i had been doing in my practice sessions at home.

Let's be clear here, it's playing a playlist to a device that has MIDI sheet music, *not* converting notes from an MP3 song to a harmonic piano scale. Don't be the idiot that throws out the stereo to make room for a disklaviar piano. :p

I guess if you were in the market for a digital piano, this might make sense. But it's a lot cheaper and simpler to hook an iPhone up to a stereo and have Siri simply play digital audio tracks from your playlist. Now if Yamaha had a REAL piano hooked up to play MIDI via Siri, that would be something!

They did have a real piano play MIDI via Siri. It's not a digital piano.

Stupid computer. He said Rhapsody in Blue, not the United Airlines theme.

Pedal down!!

Now if I could just figure out what they mean by "Take a standard MIDI songfile and convert it to an audio file (while maintaining the MIDI data)." How the heck do you do that?

Those old enough to remember tape loader computers from the 1980s, or Modems from the '90s will have some idea.

MIDI is pretty simple, and very fault tolerant. It'll accept a decent amount of signal degradation before throwing up errors.

Converting the MIDI to an analogue signal such as audio is simply a case of running the digital waveform through a DAC. Getting the digital back at the other end similarly requires only an ADC. The audio being streamed through AirPlay would be seem meaningless and unpleasant to us.

The only trick to all of this is that most ADCs and DACs limit pretty hard between about 10-20Hz and 20-24KHz. MIDI is pretty low frequency, and might not not translate well through the D-A-D process. As such, the MIDI may be mixed with a carrier wave of some kind. The article doesn't provide enough detail to know. (Edit: this process is typically known as modulation/demodulation, from where modems take their name).

Either way, this is cool, but nothing unprecedented

Cool an Apple Express!

Did we miss an announcement?

I guess if you were in the market for a digital piano, this might make sense. But it's a lot cheaper and simpler to hook an iPhone up to a stereo and have Siri simply play digital audio tracks from your playlist. Now if Yamaha had a REAL piano hooked up to play MIDI via Siri, that would be something!

That was a real piano playing MIDI. I own one (though I own the upright version). Believe me. It's real. Mine was $17,000. The one they're showing there is I believe in the $40-50K range (someone please correct me if I'm wrong). My piano tuner would definitely confirm that it's real ;)

Now if I could just figure out what they mean by "Take a standard MIDI songfile and convert it to an audio file (while maintaining the MIDI data)." How the heck do you do that?

So if I wanted to get my piano to play the Albany YEM...?

Hahaha, love this phish reference.... Would love to hear the vocal jam done by this piano...