An experiment has been conducted, measuring pianists’ sensitivity to piano key vibrations at the fingers while playing an upright or a grand Yamaha Disklavier piano. At each trial, which consisted in playing loud and long A notes across the whole keyboard, vibrations were either present or absent through setting the Disklavier pianos to normal or quiet mode. Sound feedback was always provided b...

Weirs have widely been used for the flow measurement, flow diversion and its control in the open channels. Attempts have been made to study flow over different shapes of normal weirs, side weirs and oblique weirs. This paper is connected with the development of the discharge coefficient measurement. In the present study four different weirs in different height are considered for validation purp...

A concert pianist is able to produce a wide range of imaginable nuances of musical expression by actuating the 88 keys on a piano, none of which travel through a distance greater than one centimeter. In this study, we investigated the temporal behaviour of grand piano actions from different manufacturers using different types of touch (‘legato’ versus ‘staccato’). An experimental setup consisti...

BACKGROUND Focal hand dystonia has been associated with morphometric changes and distorted somatotopic representations in the putamen. OBJECTIVE The authors used voxel-based morphometry (VBM) to identify regions in the putamen where grey-matter volume is associated with musician's dystonia (MD) or the skill level of piano playing in professional pianists. METHODS In 11 pianists with MD affe...

Tonality is an important aspect of musical structure. Detecting key of music is one of the major tasks in tonal analysis and will benefit semantic segmentation of music for indexing and searching. This paper presents an HMM-based approach for segmenting musical signals based on key change and identifying the key of each segment. Classical piano music was used in the experiment. The performance,...

Variability of Practice (VOP) refers to the acquisition of a particular target movement by practicing a range of varying targets rather than by focusing on fixed repetitions of the target only. VOP has been demonstrated to have beneficial effects on transfer to a novel task and on skill consolidation. This study extends the line of research to musical practice. In a task resembling a barrier-kn...

An exploratory experiment was carried out in which subjects with different musical skills were asked to play a digital piano keyboard, first by following a specific key sequence and style of execution, and then performing freely. Judgments of perceived sound quality were recorded in three different settings, including standard use of the digital piano with its own internal loudspeakers, and con...

The problem of skill-level-dependent modulation in the joint dynamics of multi-joint arm movements is addressed in this study using piano keystroke performed by expert and novice piano players. Using the measured kinematic and key-force data, the time varying net, gravitational, motion-dependent interaction (INT), key-reaction (REA), and muscular (MUS) torques at the shoulder, elbow, wrist, and...