This was a nice demonstration of letting these robotic hands learn to play a keyboard. The technique is limited due to constraints of the hands, and is closer to parts of the technique of early keyboard instruments like an organ or a harpsichord, rather than that of a modern grand piano, which requires a lot more control of the body core, shoulders, elbows, arms, and wrists with the fingers doing as minimal a motion as possible. I suppose a similar algorithm learning to play on a grand piano using a full humanoid body could learn a technique that would be exciting to analyze.
Tangential but your comment has just given me a penny drop moment that I can isolate each degree of freedom (finger, wrist, elbow, shoulder) and still play a key to sound a note.
For context I have been working on playing multiple lines of music with right hand lately (Chopin etudes, much struggle...) and saw a video from a professional recommending playing the main melody "with the arm". This has helped a lot with the visualisation and now I can really have a cleaner technique playing the accompaniment above the escapement (using nice flat fingers) and the melody with a much richer tone (using the arm typically for the pinky).
I sort of understood in an intuitive nonverbal sense what I am doing but after your comment, the mechanics now makes a lot more sense of what I'm actually doing - thanks!
Glad it helps. Claudio Arrau thought of the fingers as “dead” with all the piano playing happening using larger muscles. It is a struggle to internalise this concept in some Chopin etudes (op 10, no 2 especially) but it almost immediately helps in others (op 25, no 1).
Yes, that's where this model is massively missing, an accomplished pianist plays with the whole arm, the elbow is crucial, it needs to stay very relaxed in order to accommodate the peculiarities of the human hand, the ring fingers and little fingers don't have as many tendons connecting and having a little sway in the elbows is crucial to making those fingers deliver the weight of the arm properly to the keybed. This model appears to ignore rotation of the wrist, and easing the elbows, where at a bare minimum it needs to start at the shoulder, and I'd argue the whole body.
Yeah but as gp pointed out that was the style du jour of baroque and early classical as the plucking keyboards were mostly played with a finger technique
This. In fact isolating and attempting to play purely from the fingers alone is a great way to develop RSI or any number of soft tissue injuries.
There's entire schools of thought around proper ergonomics with respect to piano playing - I took lessons in the Taubman technique which (very simplistically) tries to encourage movement farther upstream on the body.
