I’m a stair-taker because elevators and escalators give me nightmares, but for all those lazy folks who don’t have fear motivating them to take the steps, there are these piano stairs. How could you not want musical accompaniment like that?

OK, so maybe you don’t want to hear a playful tune as you skip up and down steps. It’s still a fun idea and apparently showed a huge increase in individuals taking the stairs. [YouTube via Marco G.]

I have a weakness for piano players, but I don’t think I can call this Austrian guy a piano player: He doesn’t play them, he makes them talk. Freakin’ hell, here I am barely able to play the accordion.

It doesn’t do it in real time, but there’s a computer connected to this piano which analyses human speech with the assistance of a composer and converts it to key-tapping. It’s looks pretty great and is reasonably clear considering it’s a piano that’s “talking”.

You’ll quickly notice that the video’s in German, but fortunately Hack a Day’s Astera came through with a rough translation of the narration to accompany your oohs and aaahs:

Pretty amazing, how all of a sudden the words of the Declaration become understandable to a European Environmental Criminal Court. Wien Modern was one out of ten cultural institutions asked for an artistic contribution to the event in Palazzo Ducale in Venice.

The ambitious goal was to make this message audible with musical means, without falling back to a simple setting.

Berno Polzer: I think, its partially understandable, partially not. And it plays well with the limits of our construction abilities. That is, we hear sounds that obviously aren’t normal music, but neither they are language, and one could say that sometimes, a bridging happens. Personally, I think you can understand individual words even without knowing the text, and the Eureka moment happens when you see the text, and suddenly, the language is there.

Yet another bridge: Miro Markus, an elementary school student from Berlin, narrated the text for the performance: Youth as a hope for the older generation.

The Austrian composer Peter Ablinger transferred the frequency spectrum of the child’s voice to his computer controlled mechanical piano.

Peter Ablinger: I break down this phonography, meaning a recording of something the voice, in this case -, in individual pixels, one can say. And if I have the possibility of a rendering in a fairly high resolution (and that I only get with a mechanical piano), then I in fact restore some kind of continuity. Therefore, with a little practice, or help or subtitling, we actually can hear a human voice in a piano sound.

From voice to “pixels” to music back to speech. Incredible. Now. Who’s gonna make a talking trumpet? [YouTube]

The Audi Design Team collaborated with piano maker Bosendorfer to construct this grand piano, which was commissioned to celebrate Audi’s centennial. Here was their philosophy:

Generous surface areas ensure formal clarity; there are no decorative applications, the edges and lines are sharply drawn, the joints logically positioned. All these are important aspects of the Audi design.

And coincidentally, none are important aspects of piano design. But that’s not the point, I suppose. The piano—brushed aluminium pedals, hood-prop-esque stand, wraparound body and all—will be debuted at the July 16th Audi Forum in Ingolstadt, and is (probably symbolically) prices at around $US140,000. $140,000. [Autoevolution via Newlaunches]

So Yamaha went to work on AvantGrand, an ingenious digital piano that uses strategically-placed resonators to pound the pianist with sound and vibrations, just like the real thing! In fact, the Yamaha CFIIIS concert grand was used to create the digital samples for this piano, and that is the real thing.

Even the pedals were tweaked to more closely resemble the mechanical feel of a traditional string and hammer piano.

Yamaha spokeswoman Alicia Keys demo’d the tech at the NAMM convention in LA on Saturday, and came away loving her vibrating piano, which she said was like a friend but better because it couldn’t talk (seriously).

You, too, can vibrate to Mozart or Beethoven or covered pop hits from Keys when the AvantGrand arrives in July for $US20,000. [OC Register via DVICE]

Old-style player pianos, which rely on rolls of dimpled paper tablature to cue a piano to play music, have been helping their owners cheat for the better part of two centuries. For 108 years or that, QRS Technologies was a leading manufacturer of the song rolls, the production of which has ceased as of this week.

Analog player pianos had a certain charm. You could watch them deliberately plunk out just about any tune like some kind of outsize music box, and the bare mechanics of the whole affair were as honest as they were tacky. QRS has apparently moved, with some success, to digital player pianos, which rely on servos and disks over braille and gears. The most profound difference, though, is one of identity: Where analogue player pianos were a fascinating predecessor to MIDI synthesisers, digital pianos are MIDI synthesizers, something which Bob Berkman, the company’s music director, seems to grasps, sadly:

“We’re still doing what we always did, which is to provide software for pianos that play themselves. It’s just the technology that has changed. But I would be lying to say [the halting of production] doesn’t sadden me.”

[Buffalo News]

Files are stored onto the piano’s hard drive and can be transferred via USB to a PC, and then easily burned onto a CD for in-car listening. Plus, if you hook up the piano to a TV, you can display lyrics and graphics for a song on it. The best part? You can stream songs from the internet and have the piano play it by itself, depressing the keys and pedals at the right time, fooling your parents into thinking you’ve learned the song when you’ve actually spent the time playing your NES! Win! [Yamaha]

Professor Luigi Colani reimagined the traditional 88 keys and gave the classic grand piano a futuristic organic shape with some virtuoso upgrades. The Pegasus features a ergonomic curved keyboard ( i. e. the keys exhibit a slight curvature ) that encompasses 7 1/4 octaves, a electrically operated hydraulic lid that allows you to control the specific amount of projection desired, a fallboard “soft close” system, the original Schimmel Triplex Scale “CAPE” precision soundboard tri-dimensionally curved and formed with a “high performance” back assembly with tension collector, a Sostenuto pedal (middle pedal), a fully-adjustable integrated black leather upholstered stool extendible in width, height, and distance to the keyboard, and a hard-wearing professional lacquer finish resulting in a grand piano of breathtaking elegance.

The Schimmel Pegasus comes with all this and the guarantee that your skills won’t get any closer to Prince’s than when you played with your Casiotone.

Update: According to the Mr. Koveleski, they are asking only US$110,000, and their highest bit is currently at $100,000. The piano is now located in Northern California. The original owner is not any famous person, however, but “the CEO of a famous San Francisco Bay Area music store.” [Automorrow and Autoworldmobilia]

Longtime buyer, first-time seller “Compianos” says that the piano he used for the mod is an “upright grand”—I have always considered those two styles to be mutually exclusive. Besides that, we have some doubt as to the 6.8 GHz processor which he says runs Windows XP Media Center Edition with 1GB RAM and a 500 GB hard drive. And there is an air of desperation in his alternative payment suggestion: “I will consider a trade of an automobile + cash.” He does, however, make a very reasoned appeal to “wives”:

“Afraid you cannot afford it? Think again. Look at all the toys (cars/boats/RVs) your husband owns, pick one (with a clear title) and make me an offer. He’ll understand, especially when he sees it. Don’t you deserve it?”

The Buy It Now price is $US19,998 (which would include shipping); the opening bid (which would not) is $US6,998. In any case, he plans to give at least 20% of the sale price to charity. Now, isn’t that enough incentive to be “the first owner and the only one in the world who can boast to have one”? [eBay via Gear Diary, Gadget Lab]