GESTURE PIANO

A grand piano played with two hands in the air. One hand chooses the harmony, the other decides how it is voiced and how it is touched, and every sounding note rises from the keyboard as a vibrating string of light.

Gesture Piano adapts the two-hand chord language of Eric Wei's open-source Gesture Synth into a playable acoustic instrument. The chord hand picks a scale degree with its fingers and turns minor when it tilts inward. The voicing hand picks the voicing with one to four fingers, drops the chord an octave with the thumb, sets how hard the keys are struck with its height and sets the tone with its tilt. Instead of sustained oscillators, every change strikes real piano strings that decay naturally, with a damper, a sustain pedal, a bass note and rolled or arpeggiated playing. The hand reading, sampled piano engine and visuals are a new implementation.