Abstract
The piano keyboard offers a significant range and polyphony for well-trained pianists. Yet, apart from dynamics, the piano is incapable of translating expressive movements such as vibrato onto the played note. Adding sound effects requires additional modalities. A pitch wheel can be found on the side of most electric pianos. To add a vibrato or pitch bend, the pianist needs to actively operate the pitch wheel with their hand, which requires cognitive effort and may disrupt play. In this work, we present EMPiano, a system that allows pianists to incorporate a soft pitch vibrato into their play seamlessly. Vibrato can be triggered through muscle activity and is recognized via electromyography. This allows EMPiano to integrate into piano play. Our system offers new interaction opportunities with the piano to increase the player’s potential for expressive play. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). CHI ’21 Extended Abstracts, May 8–13, 2021, Yokohama, Japan © 2021 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-8095-9/21/05. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3451556 In this paper, we contribute the open-source implementation and the workflow behind EMPiano.
