[Noisebridge-discuss] Getting a piano for NB

[Sai Emrys]

On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 9:00 PM, Rachel McConnell <rachel at xtreme.com> wrote:
> What other ideas can we come up with?

I don't know if one can actually do this without screwing the
acoustics, but it might be possible to rig it to be totally
soundproofed, with a mic inside attached to a headphone jack.

It's overcomplicated and might not work, but it'd let someone play
without bothering people.

Or there's always the 'gut the thing entirely and turn it into an
electric piano' option. Electric guitars, at least, are very quiet
when not amped.

Possible ways to do this (mind, I have zero knowledge of this stuff,
so I'm just speculating):
* a la electric guitar: real strings, no soundboard/resonance,
?magnetic pickup to sense vibration, dump that to magic software
* pressure sensor hit by the hammer
* accelerometer on the hammer or the key itself

My guess is that it'd take a lot of work though, and I have no
knowledge of how to do it.

Someone on IRC linked to a guy who did exactly this. I've lost the
link though. It had no details of how it was done, just a demo video
and a comment that it took ~250 hours of work. (It was more blingy
than it would need to be though; dunno how much of the time was on
that.) He might be a good person to ask.

- Sai