An interactive audiovisual installation “Piano Genie” was featured at the conference:
20th International Symposium on Sound Engineering and Tonmeistering, ISSET 2025
Kurator: Tomasz Misiak
Galeria Duża Scena UAP, ul. Wodna 24
09–13.10.2025
Piano Genie is an experimental AI-based musical interface created as part of Google’s Magenta project, allowing any user to improvise with the help of a simple controller. The system maps 8 input signals onto the full range of 88 piano keys, generating melody in real time. The model was trained on approximately 1,400 recordings from the digital archive of the International Piano-e-Competition, which enables it to reflect many piano techniques present in classical music.
This peculiar instrument becomes part of today’s “virtual orchestras” (described, among others, by the philosopher of music Harry Lehmann in the widely discussed book The Digital Revolution in Music), which generate questions characteristic of digital culture about the originality and uniqueness of musical creativity. One of the best-known orchestras of this kind, Paul Henry Smith’s The Fauxharmonic Orchestra, already emphasizes in its very name the faux pas characteristic of such practices. But what exactly is the breach of “etiquette” in this case? It seems that there is no longer any set of rules denying today’s digital natives the possibility of playing musical instruments without knowledge of music theory or years of formal study.
It also seems that in this case, it is not really about music, but about playing with sound. Using an unusual controller, Robert Gogol invites the audience to interact with the Piano Genie neural network. These are sounds at one’s fingertips, capable of forming sophisticated musical structures through uninhibited play supported by a network trained on 1,400 piano performances. It is as if this were neural assistance, encouraging us to test our own abilities for improvisation and for interaction with living sound. But are we able to play together? Can stepping out of the private space, where we usually indulge in such forms of entertainment, contribute to greater openness and creativity? Are we capable of shedding the burden of the history of classical music and playing at music with the awareness that we do not have to be musicians? The Piano Genie neural network controller has been designed in such a way that, in addition to solo playing, it also enables interaction for two people.
Tomasz Misiak
Robert Gogol: PhD candidate at the Department of Acoustics, Faculty of Physics and Astronomy, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. He studies the influence of the spectrotemporal structure of sound on the perception of speech and music. He combines scientific research with engineering and artistic practice.
PIANO GENIE REPO >> https://github.com/chrisdonahue/piano-genie
MAGENTA PROJECT – Piano Genie origin >> https://magenta.tensorflow.org/pianogenie
Piano Genie – PLAY ONLINE here !! >> https://chrisdonahue.com/piano-genie/