Play it again, Spirio

A piano that captures the data of live performance offers the MIT community new possibilities for studying and experimenting with music. Seated at the grand piano in MIT's Killian Hall last fall, first-year student Jacqueline Wang played through the lively opening of Mozart's "Sonata in B-flat major, K.333." When she'd finished, Mi-Eun Kim, pianist and lecturer in MIT's Music and Theater Arts Section (MTA), asked her to move to the rear of the hall. Kim tapped at an iPad. Suddenly, the sonata she'd just played poured forth again from the piano - its keys dipping and rising just as they had with Wang's fingers on them, the resonance of its strings filling the room. Wang stood among a row of empty seats with a slightly bemused expression, taking in a repeat of her own performance. "That was a little strange," Wang admitted when the playback concluded, then added thoughtfully: "It sounds different from what I imagine I'm playing." This unusual lesson took place during a nearly three-week residency at MIT of the Steinway Spirio r, a piano embedded with technology for live performance capture and playback. "The residency offered students, faculty, staff, and campus visitors the opportunity to engage with this new technology through a series of workshops that focused on such topics as the historical analysis of piano design, an examination of the hardware and software used by the Spirio r, and step-by-step guidance of how to use the features," explains Keeril Makan, head of MIT Music and Theater Arts and associate dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.