Editor’s note: Besides following tech developments, our author is a musical composer (Juilliard-trained). He has provided a musical composition for you to listen to while reading this column. This piece is called “Rise Prelude Piano Version.”
Fifty years ago, photography enthusiasts carried large, heavy camera bags with more than one camera, more than one lens, various filters, spare film, a tripod, and more. The equipment was expensive, heavy, and fragile, although less costly, less heavy, and less fragile than fifty years before that when a photographer needed a horse to go out to shoot a picture.
Photographers needed to focus their cameras, frequently change lenses, determine the exposure time, and correctly set the aperture. Do-overs were problematic and expensive as you used up rolls of film. There were no erasable, reusable memory chips. Nor were there image stabilization circuitry, technology to stitch together panoramic views, instant viewing of results, or in-camera editing. If you wanted a sequence of images, you needed a motor drive to advance the film, which very quickly got used up.
Not only did you need a darkroom where you dealt with smelly, toxic chemicals that had to be temperature-controlled, but you also had to develop the film into negatives or slides and then make prints with an enlarger. These wet processes ultimately had to produce dry, handleable results. The process was time consuming, involving much waiting.
In addition to navigating through these processes and patiently waiting, you had to either hand deliver, FedEx, or snail mail the images in order to share them. They could not be emailed or digitally stored, sorted, and post-processed. In short, you had to be a nerd who pursued diminishing returns and usually smelled pretty bad from the chemicals.
As a teenager, I was that photographer nerd with a darkroom I had built, where I also did all the electrical work, plumbing, lightproofing, and chemical mixing. My parents permitted me to turn their laundry room and garage into a darkroom as long as they could still do laundry and park the car when I was not using it. This forced me to invent moveable lightproof walls in the garage and temperature-controlled chemical baths in the laundry room.
This whole process is now obsolete and no longer required to take good pictures. It is as different today as the horse and buggy were from modern automobiles. And, by the way, when I got old enough to discover girls and wanted to go on dates, I changed my stripes to become a musician, which was less antisocial. I was still a nerd, but sometimes, I could temporarily pass for being almost cool when performing. As a fifteen-year-old playing my first gig with a borrowed bass at a sweet sixteen party full of girls, I was converted. I used the money I had saved up to do silk screening and instead bought an electric guitar. I never looked back. Of course, photographers do not have these problems now, but, unless they are fashion photographers, they are still not as cool as guitarists.
As all music majors have discovered, you must learn to play the piano to be a music major, composer, or conductor. Composers and conductors usually know how to play multiple instruments, but the fact remains that the piano is the king of the instruments because it can play the melody, chords, and bass simultaneously. And yes, so can organs, but they tend to be built into buildings and are even less portable than pianos. And yes, some guitarists, but not many, can also play all these musical elements simultaneously. Hardly any guitarists can perform solo, but almost all pianists can.
Before the stereo system was invented, the piano was the musical entertainment system in most cultured households, at least until it got bumped off by the guitar around the same time jazz got bumped off by rock n’ roll.
As a pianist who was forced to play guitar because it was more portable and possibly because it was also more relaxed, I did try putting an upright piano in the back of a pickup truck and playing that around town, but let’s say it was logistically suboptimal. I determined that the world needed a portable, self-contained piano—or at least I determined that I needed one.
This sent me off on another truly nerd path; I spent ten years of my college and graduate school life learning how to make one. Along the way, I accumulated degrees in acoustics, physics, electroacoustics, and digital signal processing. I ended up working at Bose Corporation, where it took me several years to convince management that I was not the only one who needed a portable, self-contained piano. In fact, I wanted to create an entire portable orchestra based on integrating synthesizers, speakers, equalizers, and amplifiers. It has taken a few more decades, and a much larger community of nerds than just me working on my own, but it is happening now.
Back to digital portable pianos., which evolved along two tracks. The first iteration involved sampling, in which dedicated hardware, housing speakers and amplifiers, played back sampled piano waveforms; this is how the Bose Acoustic Wave Piano, which I developed in the mid-eighties, worked. Wave pianos certainly sounded a lot like pianos; after all, there were playing back piano waveforms. But it turned out that these dedicated hardware systems had neither the computational bandwidth to perform necessary modeling calculations nor the storage to store all the necessary waveform velocity levels.
The other approach was called physical modeling, in which software equations would recreate the sound of a piano from scratch. Tradeoffs between the two approaches continue today, where sampled instruments require a lot of memory and sound like robots playing real pianos, while modeled instruments sound like real pianists playing robotic pianos. Sampling is better at the steady-state continuous portions of the music, while modeling is better for the transients of attack and decay.
This is where computers step in, as they have the capability to do both sampling and modeling. Dedicated piano applications can accomplish what is called software synthesis. The mighty systems available in today’s computerized piano players are the software equivalent of pianos that cost many hundreds of thousand dollars.
It is a fascinating time now to be a pianist. Thanks to today’s technology, an expenditure of one or two thousand dollars can yield an acoustical audio experience far better than an acoustic piano at the same price. No acoustical piano for under ten thousand dollars can even begin to complete with the software emulations, which is why Hollywood composers often use them for film soundtracks.
If you intend to be a pianist today and do not win some international competition by the time you are twenty, you will end up in these digital waters. And even if you become a world-famous pianist, you will still be thrown into the digital world because of how many inherent advantages these digital systems offer.
We are seeing the same trend toward computerization among writers. Not too long ago, writers used typewriters; then they moved to hardware word processors, and then to software word processor programs like Microsoft Word that included dictation, spell-checking, and grammar-checking. Now AI-assisted improvements in writing and editing, though still imperfect, are getting better every day as our computers get faster and faster.
It is not only photographers and pianists who are radically impacted by tech; so are all authors, writers, presenters, speakers, and anyone who communicates.
