Comment by publicdebates
2 days ago
Tangential:
"Aisatsana - Aphex Twin - Barbican, London 10th October 2012. It's a bit dark so it's probably difficult to tell but that's a grand piano being swung back and forth across the stage like a pendulum."
"Yeah, it's written for my wife. When I first did that, I did this installation-y art thing at the Barbican with a remote orchestra. [The song] was made on my Disklavier [controlled piano], which was swung from the roof at that gig, and there was this massive Doppler effect. It is pretty mental. There's a bad cameraphone version of it on YouTube, but in the flesh it's fucking amazing. To listen to this piano swinging, you almost see all the notes stretching out, so it'll hit you at different times. I never knew if it was going to work or not, and everyone was like, “What the fuck is he swinging a piano for?” But when we actually got it going, we were just like, “fucking hell.” It was so extreme. My friends were like, “Are the strings stretching?” The pitch deviation is that big, it sounds like the actual frame is contorting. Maybe it is, I don't know!" - Richard D. James
I know the year has just started but I vote this comment of the year 2026. Wow. Thank you. Seriously. Of all the things you could do with a piano this has to be the most crazy, and it just works.
I reluctantly decline and instead endorse https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46538574
There's no debating about taste ;)
Goes a few steps past threading metal nuts that move on grand piano strings, that's for ure.
Aisatsana, the final track on Syro. For Syro fans, there's a song called "end E2" that didn't make the cut, presumably it would've been the last song.
> Missing track from Syro, didn't make it for technical and personal reasons.
https://soundcloud.com/user21041984001/syro-013-aphex-twin-e...
Academic electroacoustic music uses large speaker arrays to place sounds in different locations, and "flying pianos" is a standard in-joke. Because you can indeed make a piano sound fly around the room, with or without doppler effects, to taste.
Also, this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hbnb09xAQR8
Stage is quite wide so doppler shift could be in the semi-tones range depending on microphone placement. Estimating the shift at around 3% from that video. The piano is standing on a platform that is itself on the hoist so I'd be surprised if there was much frame bending.
I thought he was just bullshitting again until I watched that video
Pure genius.
Now of course we have to know what the rotary speaker equivalent of a grand piano sounds like... anybody have a couple of very large bearings lying around?