Software pianos are eating the classical piano’s world

Marc Andreessen, co-founder and General Partner of Venture Capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), published his essay “Software is eating the world” in The Wall Street Journal in 2011. Happy ten year anniversary!

This slogan, however, struck me in an unexpected way when we went shopping for a new electric/electronic (and from here on: digital) piano today. My better half confided in me that the one we purchased almost twenty years started to lose sound, and given how important music is to her, I feared we would be entering an existential crisis.

Being entirely a-musical, despite my parent’s best efforts, did not stop me from musing (pun intended) about what a modern electronic piano should be like. For sure, the sound should adjust to what you like it to sound rather than what the world thinks a grand piano should sound like. The resistance of the keys should be adjustable. Bluetooth connectivity, recording/playback, etc. would be taken for granted. And it should be largely maintenance — i.e., tuning — free.

So, little surprise I was completely hyped when we were demonstrated a Roland product that did just that, and much more. Flip a button, and the piano would sound like percussion. Flip it once more, and it would be a bass. You can also double up on individual keys and sound like a chamber orchestra by yourself. A different setting splits the keyboard into two equal pieces, and you can play four-handed on it. Let your creativity reign. It’s just software, stupid!

Interestingly enough, the salesperson told us that Yamaha, probably *the* top piano brand in Japan, struggled a bit with going digital. The majority of their salesforce and their management would have come through the “classical” channel and strive to build the perfect analog piano. At this point, the grand piano is also still their prime revenue source. That might well be the best approach to satisfy Yuja Wang and Lang Lang, however, for most other players, especially in Japan with notoriously small apartments, you can pack a much bigger punch into a much more confined space by going digital.

One notion was that Yamaha allegedly uses recorded sounds from their grand piano, and replays them as-is on their digital products. That means, if you hit multiple keys at once, they sound as if they were all played solitarily. By contrast, Roland also uses recorded sounds, but modulates them with software based on the combinations they are used in. The result is a much more natural, and ironically, much more grand piano-like sound. In other words, Yamaha seeks to duplicate the analog into the digital world, while Roland make use of digital capabilities to tease out a superior performance. Or so they say.

The interesting aspect of the whole discussion was that the digital piano was still made to look like a piano. Could you think of different, maybe a little more convenient form factors that suit the uninitiated? Just like this Roland piano can play the drums and bass, could you build the piano as a bass guitar, but make it sound like a grand piano? The opportunities are endless.

Which brings us, slightly off-topic, to an article on the future of recreational vehicles (RVs) I came across recently. Once you are no longer confined by a design based on a combustion engine, what form factor could you imagine? Just a few days ago, elecrek featured “Stella Vita”, a self-sustaining house on wheels. This means that the mobile house is self-sufficient in terms of energy. Through solar panels on the roof, it is independent of charging stations. The vehicle generates enough solar energy to drive, shower, watch TV, charge your laptop, and make coffee.

It is not quite what you imagined an RV to look like, right? So wherever we are bound by historical hardware constraints in industrial design, where the hardware solution is transitioning to software, new opportunities abound. Old players struggled to adapt. New players, or players from an adjacent area (like Roland’s keyboards) challenge. Where in your industry are you constraint by hardware design today?

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