Myself and Matthew Olden put on a workshop yesterday at Bath International Music Festival called Let’s Play Piano.

For this we transformed a normal piano into an kind-of player piano by attaching motors and tapping machines to its strings. We then based the workshop around composing music by translating drawings and patterns into musical scores to trigger the devices on the piano automatically.

Matthew made a custom piece of software that scanned across an image, picking up the light and dark areas, triggering notes on the piano like a sequencer.

We also made tunes for winding music boxes as an introduction to the idea of a piano roll, and Matthew also made a digital sequencer to trigger software instruments, and more ‘graphic scores’ were created on this too.

Here are some videos of what was created