The Piano of the Future

For the fifth and final part in the series ‘Key Moments’, John steps forward into the future of the piano; this versatile, creative, inspirational musical instrument he is fascinated by and has spent his life exploring. He meets three people who are physically and metaphorically taking the piano apart and reinventing it with AI and robotics and the increasingly porous human/technology interface. Sarah Nicolls is a classically trained pianist who has literally stood the instrument on its head, she has engineered the upright piano, levitating the strings by 45 degrees to be at right angles to the keyboard. Ben Eyes has reprogrammed an old Victorian piano to become robotic, using machine learning to play by itself, with or without human interaction. Lastly, John meets Professor Andrew McPherson, who runs the Augmented Instruments Lab at Imperial College. He’s built a Magnetic Resonance Piano, which produces the beautiful sustain and reverberation sound John has been exploring all his life.

Presented by John Foxx
Produced by Anna Horsbrugh Porter
A Just Radio production for BBC Radio 3