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.
Wang was one of several residency participants to have the out-of-body experience of hearing herself play from a different vantage point, while watching the data of her performance scroll across a screen: color-coded rectangles indicating the velocity and duration of each note, an undulating line charting her use of the damper pedal. Wang was even able to edit her own performance, as she discovered when Kim suggested her rhythmic use of the pedal might be superfluous. Using the iPad interface to erase the pedaling entirely, they listened to the playback again, the notes gaining new clarity.
"See? We don't need it," Kim confirmed with a smile.
"When MIT's new music building (W18) opens in spring 2025, we hope it will include this type of advanced technology. It would add value not just to Wang's cohort of 19 piano students in the Emerson/Harris Program, which provides a total of 71 scholars and fellows with support for conservatory-level instruction in classical, jazz, and world music. But could also offer educational opportunities to a much wider swath of the MIT community," says Makan. "Music is the fifth-most popular minor at MIT; 1,700 students enroll in music and theater arts classes each semester, and the Institute is brimming with vocalists, composers, instrumentalists, and music history students."
According to Kim, the Spirio enables insights beyond what musicians could learn from a conventional recording; hearing playback directly from the instrument reveals sonic dimensions an MP3 can't capture. "Speaker systems sort of crunch everything down - the highs and the lows, they all kind of sound the same. But piano solo music is very dynamic. It's supposed to be experienced in a room," she says.
