Transferring Piano Performance Control across Environments

Player pianos driven by computers are able to record and reproduce various performance control parameters, including pitch, timing, velocity and pedaling. However, the resulting sound of performance is not 100% reproducible in a new environment due to the difference in room acoustics and physical properties of the piano. Inspired by the Psychoacoustic studies which showed that human pianists adjust their controls in new environments for better performances, we have developed a system that automatically transfers performance control across environments in order to make the reproduced sound as similar as the original one. In specific, our work includes (1) a systematic measurement of the control-sound relationship of player pianos under different environments, and (2) a novel algorithm to adjust the control parameters through interpolating the measured control-sound functions. We evaluated the effectiveness of our method by conducting a listening test. Experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms the baseline significantly.