Thomas Edison may have been a revolutionary inventor, but he lacked an ear for music.

After creating the world’s first audio recording and playback device in 1887, the father of the lightbulb worked for years to establish his own recording label, Edison Records, seeking out some of the world’s greatest musicians to cash in on their prestige.

Edison, who called jazz music “for the nuts” and asserted that the Metropolitan Opera was “lacking in tune,” insisted on vetting the artists and recordings himself.

By the time he signed pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff, one of the world’s greatest pianists, in 1919, Edison had lost about 80% of his hearing due to scarlet fever and head trauma. When the two men first met, Edison allegedly called the Russian master a “pounder,” and he later released recording takes that Rachmaninoff hadn’t approved in a breach of contract. The pair parted ways.

Still, Rachmaninoff’s original Edison “Diamond Disc” recordings were wildly popular and are still available today, complete with all the hisses and pops and scratches of a 105-year-old album. They are imperfect re-creations at best.

But imagine if it were possible to hear Rachmaninoff himself performing in your living room, not on a recording or an old pneumatic player piano, but an actual acoustic performance on a 21st-century concert grand piano.

It’s not impossible.

Recent years have seen a surge in options for physical customization of the piano and an enormous leap forward in the merging of acoustic and digital technologies, with AI applications cracking open a Pandora's box of possibilities.

Today’s technology could recreate Rachmaninoff’s playing by Frankensteining together a blend of AI machine learning trained on sound recordings and human performance input to create a lifelike facsimile of his pianistic style and mannerisms. The Japan-based Yamaha Corporation has been experimenting for years with this process and has already resuscitated the style of the late Glenn Gould — Hannibal Lecter’s favorite pianist — using old recordings with the permission of Gould’s estate.

The company could do so with other famous departed performers, creating credible reproductions of their playing just waiting to be downloaded into contemporary, wi-fi-compatible player pianos in enthusiasts’ homes and on college campuses and even in performance halls.

“I mean, that creeps me out,” said Peter Stumpf, an old-school piano technician who keeps the Pittsburgh Symphony’s twin Steinway grand pianos in tip-top shape.

These digital facsimiles, these ghosts in the piano, are a little like the holographic reincarnations of Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley and opera singer Maria Callas, all of which have given “necromantic” performances in recent years.

“I’m not sure how I feel about hearing dead Prokofiev playing in my living room,” Stumpf said.

Pianos have been around for over 300 years, not counting earlier incarnations like the harpsichord or clavichord. The basic mechanics of an acoustic piano haven’t changed dramatically in the intervening centuries. (Fully digital keyboards are a different animal entirely.) Strike a key and the piano’s internal “action” translates that force to a hammer that hits a string to sound a note, with the note’s pitch determined by the length of the vibrating string, amplified by the instrument’s sound board.

So what do the pianos of tomorrow look like? These instruments are becoming more bespoke and ergonomic, for those who can afford to customize. Companies including Steinway and Yamaha are building pianos in all shapes and sizes, with smaller keys that are better-suited for smaller-than-Rachmaninoff-sized hands and ergonomically curved keyboards to reduce wrist and shoulder strain.

Builders are also infusing more and more invisible technology into these acoustic instruments, creating wi-fi compatible pianos that can link with Alexa and Google Home, record and edit music on the spot and download live and recorded performances from anywhere in the world by the greatest living performers. This boom in musical tech is providing teachers with a host of additional tools to reach and train the next generation of pianists, with AI quickly becoming an adroit instructor and duet partner in its own right.

And then, there’s the cloning of departed players to consider.

Stumpf, currently in the midst of rebuilding and upgrading a battered Mason & Hamlin piano that’s been in his family for decades, scoffed at some of the techier innovations in the face of some of the piano’s critical physical developments.

“There have been tons more nuts-and-bolts advancements in the past five or 10 years that go into places nobody sees,” he said, twisting tuning pegs out from the century-old piano’s frame with practiced, calloused hands.

An old vinyl record, “The Most Happy Piano” by jazz pianist Erroll Garner — a famous Pittsburgh player who had to sit on a phone book to reach the keys — bubbled cheerfully in the background, a pellet furnace cutting through the November chill in Stumpf’s tool-strewn garage workshop.

He paused while working on the piano, intended as a wedding gift for his son, to show off a new special lubricant for piano keys and carbon fiber actions, new felt for the hammers and new acrylic key surfaces — all of which make the instrument lighter or more efficient without compromising on feel or sound quality.

These improvements are less flashy than the AI and tech advancements needed for Yamaha’s “Dear Glenn” project, and other creative programming and software releases that have pianos responding to live performances, but they’re more critical to the pianos already in existence.

The new materials and techniques can make it easier to build, adjust and perform on a piano, as reducing the force needed to play can reduce strain for pianists who have long been at risk for repetitive-use injuries like tendonitis and carpal tunnel.

Belgian piano maker Chris Maene and architect Rafael Vinoly unveiled the most radical answer to wrist strain yet in 2022 — also tech free — with the world’s first ergonomically curved keyboard, the Maene-Vinoly Concert Grand.

Much like a curved computing keyboard follows the natural vertical curvature of the human hand, the Maene-Vinoly’s keys fan horizontally to ease some of the strain on players’ wrists, with professionals like Jonathan Biss and Wynona Wang remarking on their instant comfort with the piano’s unique shape.

A feat of mechanical engineering, it has all 88 keys like a conventional piano, but the soundboard had to be made much larger than usual to accommodate the curved design, so much so that it couldn’t fit in the regular piano elevator in Carnegie Hall in New York City for its U.S. debut in 2023. (It had to be wheeled in under the stage.)

Valued at about $509,000, these custom pianos aren’t likely to soon penetrate the global market, currently valued at $2.36 billion according to the analysis firm Business Research Insights, which projected that the valuation will grow to $2.75 billion by 2032.

Far more common and affordable are “stretto” pianos, which have roots that trace back to the pre-1800s, before Steinway & Sons began making pianos with a standard key size and number of keys (88) that would spread around the globe and become the paradigm. Today’s one-size-fits-all approach with its 6½-inch octave works better for some hands than others. Strettos have narrower key widths that are more comfortable for smaller hands.

These instruments are gaining in popularity worldwide, with companies including Steinway and Yamaha providing stretto options for current models. (Steinway adds $6,500-$7,500 to its base price to build pianos with stretto keys.)

In 2021, pianist Hannah Reimann launched Stretto Piano Concerts, an annual global festival intended to raise awareness of the instrument, and the journal Applied Ergonomics published a study titled “Interaction between hand span and different sizes of keyboards on EMG activity in pianists: An observational study.”

Researchers found “preliminary EMG data in support of the need to advocate for wider availability and use of different size keyboards to allow a better ergonomic fit to suit the dimensions of individual pianists.”

More recently, in 2023, researchers at MIT attached ultrasound sensors to the arms of pianist Mi-Eun Kim (director of keyboard studies, Music & Theater Arts) for a two-day workshop to watch how her tissue and bones flexed and relaxed as she played a passage from Frederic Chopin’s Études. Kim played on a Steinway Spirio|r player piano, an instrument that can record individual keystroke data and upload it to a computer to visualize and study alongside ultrasound scans and videos. 

“See how when the playing is smooth, the tissue separates between the radius and the ulna and how it’s more relaxed? I call it ‘smiling,’” she said in a Zoom interview. “What looks good also feels good and sounds good.”

Her research partner, Praneeth Namburi of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Sciences, specializes in studying movement and has previously worked with Olympians and dancers.

“We are heading towards a future where we have a better understanding of mobility, perhaps even improved physical awareness intelligence for musicians,” he said.

Namburi added that further study of the biomechanics of piano playing ergonomics could help develop new techniques to help students stay healthy throughout their careers and maybe even inform new styles of teaching and playing.

There are, of course, dissonant opinions, including from traditionalists who argue that a standard key size is a net positive.

“Messing with this would be like golfing with mini-golf clubs and then jumping to a full-size set of wedges,” said Joe Ravita, Pittsburgh’s resident Steinway salesman.

He said he is seeing an increasing number of customization requests, including a pricey order for a Steinway grand with an 18-karat gold drawing of the Pittsburgh skyline.

Unlike Stumpf, Ravita is more inspired by the instrument’s technological advances. At Fort Pitt Piano Co., the Steinway dealership in the Strip District, natural light flooded into a luxury showroom stuffed with alligator-skin chairs, velvet sofas and chrome candelabras.

Ravita himself was spiffed up in an elegant black-and-white suit that clashed with the tinny “Bad to the Bone” ringtone of his red flip phone. He stepped to a grand piano, its subtle black power chord sneaking off under a rug. But he didn’t sit down to play — he used an iPad to call up a performance by star pianist Yuja Wang.

As Wang appeared on a nearby television screen, the piano’s keys began to lever up and down, reproducing a delicate, almost haughty performance of Robert Schumann’s “The Smuggler” that she’d recorded specifically for the Spirio brand.

All the hallmarks of her playing were present as the piano played itself: her rhythmic intensity, her playful, hairpin shifts in dynamics and a clear joie de vivre.

Player pianos have been around since 1886 and were considered remarkable in their day. Using perforated paper rolls, they were able to produce limited dynamic changes and fell short of capturing much subtlety in performance.

Today’s instruments go a bit further than the twangy instruments that sat in Western saloons and silent film theaters. Some modern player pianos use special sensors to capture information about players’ keystrokes as digital data.

These pianos typically have solenoids that activate each hammer on the piano and its foot pedals with a much, much higher degree of sensitivity that enables them to create near-perfect, high-fidelity acoustic reproductions of any performance, which can then be downloaded anywhere in the world.

Both Steinway and Yamaha currently sell such pianos, with Steinway emphasizing resolution in their performance catalogue. But it was Yamaha that first made overtures into marrying digital technology to acoustic hardware, which would ultimately lead to the AI creations coming into vogue today.

Yamaha started as a piano and reed organ company and has since grown into an international conglomerate that makes everything from helicopters and motorcycles to semiconductors and autonomous robots. Natural crossover between research departments led to Yamaha’s first digital player piano in the early 1980s, which relied on honest-to-god floppy disks.

Yamaha introduced its Disklavier player piano in 1987, nearly 30 years before Steinway’s Spirio debuted in 2015. Each company has its own motivation.

“For us, the Spirio is about accessibility,” said Eric Feidner, Steinway’s chief technology officer and a former French horn player. “The goal is to bring the experience of hearing a great artist play an acoustic Steinway grand to as many people as we can.”

In June, Steinway & Sons — acquired in 1995 by the Selmer instrument company and later bought in 2013 by the hedge fund Paulson & Co., Inc. for $512 million — hosted watch parties all over the world as pianist Vikingur Olafsson performed a concert of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany, while those with Steinway Spirios listened to his live performance.

Steinway anticipates these live-stream performances becoming increasingly common in universities and concert halls in coming years. There are currently 105 colleges, universities, conservatories and school districts globally with around 145 Spirio Model R’s. Eighty of those institutions are in America and account for 116 of those units.

“We’re currently working with a local college and a university in placing Spirio Rs in their programs,” Ravita said.

Like the Maene-Vinoly curved keyboard, Spirio pianos are out of reach for most individual buyers. A 7-foot grand Spirio R, which allows for instant editing of the performance file in the Spirio app (unlike the original Spirio), cost $186,600 in 2024, about $50,000 more than a regular Steinway B grand model. (At least the Spirio comes with its own iPad.)

In the U.S., they are the province of wealthy aficionados and parents with children studying the piano seriously. A Pittsburgh doctor of pharmacy recently purchased two Spirio Rs — players can record themselves at home on this model — so that he could record his mother performing to preserve her legacy. A doctor in West Virginia purchased a Spirio so that he’d be able to access his son’s playing after his son left home to study piano at the Oberlin Conservatory.

“He called me once in a panic because the piano wouldn’t play, so I said, ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but can you make sure you’ve plugged it in?’ And it booted right up!” said Ravita.

Yamaha’s Disklavier also has live-streaming capabilities, but “it actually started off as a tool for teachers,” said Russ Hirota, a product manager.

“Yamaha approaches its technology primarily from a pedagogical standpoint, which is a bit of a contrast from the Spirio, where their primary drive is to get people interested in using the piano as more than a piece of furniture.”

When two Disklaviers are linked, an instructor can give a remote lesson or hear a remote audition with more fidelity than any video-call or audio recording software could create.

Pianist Frederic Chiu, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, has given masterclasses in China and South America remotely and welcomed overseas guest artists to teach his students from their homes. He’s even auditioned potential students from overseas and will host a “DKV Festival” in February to introduce students and other faculty to the instrument’s capabilities.

“I can put my toes on the pedals, like this, and I can feel their pedaling, OK?” he said, wiggling his Disklavier’s pedals. “I can actually watch how they move the keys. They can see me demonstrate. It’s a two-way remote control.”

While the performance reproductions are high fidelity, there is still a little lag, so remote duets aren’t really on the table yet.

In Chiu’s studio, his Disklavier sits in companionable silence next to a more somber Steinway grand. “In here, these two get along just fine,” he said, smiling.

Steinway’s Spirio sales, per the company, now account for about half of the company’s global profits, with the U.S. leading in Spirio sales. Meanwhile, acoustic pianos still make up a majority of Yamaha’s market share, with Disklaviers accounting for about 3% of piano sales.

Yamaha also makes hybrid acoustic-digital pianos that are becoming more and more popular as they penetrate the market. Some of the company’s more popular fusions of acoustic and digital technology is the “SILENT” piano, an acoustic instrument that can turn into a digital keyboard with a push of a button. There are also “TransAcoustic” pianos, acoustic instruments that allow for silent play as well as different layering options in a blend of acoustic and digital sound.

“These work sort of like putting an iPhone into a cup to make the speaker louder. It’s a natural amplifier,” said Joseph Raville, a Dallas-based piano technician who specializes in working with pianos that employ digital technology.

The former trumpet player visited Pittsburgh in August for Pittsburgh Opera’s annual piano sale, which saw dozens of used Yamaha pianos lining the company’s building, an old air brake factory. Individuals and teachers wandered among the rows and tested them, providing strains of Beethoven and Mozart and even the theme from “The Godfather.”

Raville moved from instrument to instrument to demonstrate each one’s unique capabilities, ending with the Disklavier and demonstrating a program that teaches novices to play the tune “Happy Birthday” by wiggling each key in ghostly succession, visually guiding a player through plucking out the tune.

“It’s like bowling with bumpers,” he said, chuckling.

Personally, Raville keeps only a simple acoustic upright Yamaha piano at home. Sans tech.

The first player piano was built in Detroit in 1896, not long after Edison introduced his phonograph to the world. The devices inspired wonder and terror alike. The New York Times editorialized satirically: “Something ought to be done about Mr. Edison, and there is a growing conviction that it ought to be done with a hemp rope,” railing about the phonograph’s potential to invade privacy.

America’s favorite dark satirist, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., titled his first novel “Player Piano” a few decades later.

“The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings ... not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems,” Vonnegut wrote, predicting that an increasingly mechanized future would ultimately bring about a class war.

What would Vonnegut have thought of the Spirio? Of the Disklavier? Of the restaurants in Eastern China that swapped out human pianists for Xiaole, a robot with the ability to read and respond to human emotions? Video recordings of Xialoe show the automaton playing in the cracks between keys at least as often as a human performer.

There are glimmers of sci-fi dystopia at the edges of some of today’s experiments with piano technology, hints of the great replacement fears shared by artists and blue collar workers alike. But for every Orwellian example of a machine learning to pacify humans with emotionally manipulative music or bring dead performers back for ghoulish performances, there are instances of tech being used to make the instrument more accessible.

Yamaha’s AI Project YOO acts as an AI duet partner, adding harmony and counterpoint to a player’s performance in real time. The company is training the Disklavier to respond to live performance to be able to accompany other instrumentalists or singers when a live pianist isn’t available. It has created a program that translates the movements of a dancer into notes on the piano using sensors on the dancer’s body and translating input into MIDI data.

And then there’s Yamaha’s “Dear Glenn” project, which combined AI machine learning with human performances to create a facsimile of the famous departed player’s performances, all with the blessing of Gould’s estate.

Currently, there is no way to translate audio directly to a modern player piano. A player piano cannot reproduce a tune from a recording alone — it needs MIDI or some other sort of digital data, which has to be input by a human performer.

Then, AI can adjust the human’s performance data to mimic the player’s style more closely, as Yamaha did for Gould’s playing. (Hannibal Lecter would be thrilled.) It worked with pieces Gould had actually recorded as well as pieces he hadn’t, and the process could certainly be applied to other performers to resurrect their styles.

Yes, including Sergei Rachmaninoff.

This tech hasn’t been released to the public yet. “These things are happening in our labs, but it's just not at the forefront at the moment,” Hirota said.

Yet, the AI revolution is coming.

“There will be a utilization of more AI in our products at some point down the line. … ‘Percolating’ is the word that comes to mind, for now,” the Yamaha product manager said.

For now, the company is focused on improving the pedagogical functionality of its pianos and on connecting pianos with other household devices like Alexa and Google Home to integrate the instrument more seamlessly into owners’ lives. (Alexa, play “Despacito” in the style of Rachmaninoff on the Disklavier.)

“Back in the 1500s and 1600s, early pianos — clavichords and harpsichords — were hyper individualized with different key sizes and paint jobs and tuning systems. And now we’re coming full circle,” Hirota said.

“Right, in 300 years, the piano hasn't changed very much, really,” said Chiu, the pianist.

“I remember when [superstorm] Sandy came to the New England area, and it knocked out power in my town for a week. I went into my music room at night, where I had my grand piano, and I sat down and played it. And I realized that this is what Chopin had. This is what Liszt had. This is what all these great composers had — the acoustic piano is already one of the most amazing technological inventions in humanity. It's just absolutely incredible.”

Jeremy Reynolds: jreynolds@post-gazette.com. His work at the Post-Gazette is supported in part by a grant from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Getty Foundation and Rubin Institute.