The clavichord, in contrast, allowed you to control the dynamics of the sound produced but the compromises that were made to make this possible meant that the instrument was too quiet for bigger performances. The harpsicord was quite loud, but the player had no control over the loudness of individual pitches. The predecessors of the piano had a problem with loudness. He had to solve a previously unsolved mechanical problem to make it happen (how do you build a keyboard instrument in which when you press a key, a hammer strikes a string but immediately detaches from it to let the string ring instead of sticking to it and damping it? And do this while allowing the hammer to be actuated in quick succession at the same time?). It’s like the inventor, Bartolomeo Cristofori, fulfilled a feature request long sought after by music performers and composers. The main selling point of this new instrument was that it allowed the player to comfortably control the loudness of the notes while playing it. The Italian inventor of the piano named it un cimbalo di cipresso di piano e forte (“a keyboard of cypress with soft and loud”) and the name was later abbreviated as pianoforte (soft-loud) then simply as piano. The construction continues to evolve even today, and the sound of a 200 years old piano is significantly different than the modern piano we have today. But the idea that made the piano possible goes back to hundreds of years earlier than that the piano is an important evolutionary step within the series of instruments that preceded it. The piano is a relatively new instrument, about 300 years old. What is the big deal? Why can’t sampled piano creators sample the mere 88 keys of a good piano placed in a good room with good quality microphones, package it and call it a day? Piano Construction 101 My aim was to have a convincing sampled piano inside a browser with at most 2 to 3 megabytes so that the site would load just like any other javascript and media heavy site.īefore I talk about the compromises that needed to be made to make this a reality, let’s talk about why a good piano sample library requires gigabytes worth of information to begin with. Disregarding the possible illegality of redistributing a commercial piano sample library product, even if you compress the samples to lossy formats in such a library, it will still amount to a few hundred megabytes. However a good quality sampled piano library has an uncompressed size of a whopping few gigabytes. The website was mainly aimed at casual crowds of music loving people that are not used to waiting more than a few seconds for a game-like experience to (down)load into their web browser. We’ll get back to that at the end of this document. 3434), audio in Android still sucks quite a bit and Chromium WebAudio latency is still too high for the purposes of this instrument (but still pretty damn impressive better than my expectations considering the possible layers of buffering involved in the mess that is Linux audio), so I had to rewrite an inferior sound engine in Java to get it to work on Android devices. These mobile apps also use native WebViews and utilize HTML, Javascript and WebAudio under the hood except for the audio in Android because even after all those years (link is to the infamous issue no. It also has iOS and Android versions at the moment with a bigger and growing music library. Touch Pianist is a HTML5 web browser experiment using HTML5 Canvas (optional WebGL thanks to pixi.js) and WebAudio, which provides a visualization of all-time popular classical piano pieces, and gives you a very addictive way of performing those pieces using your computer keyboard or a touch screen. I received a lot of questions from fellow developers about the tech used to make it tick, so here is my attempt at explaining the meat of the sound engine I created to make it possible. The Browser Sound Engine Behind Touch Pianist Īt the beginning of May 2015, I released the fun browser experiment Touch Pianist.
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