In the lobby of my dad’s hotel: a Yamaha Disklavier grand. They’re not exactly new, but they’re still amaz­ing. Yamaha engi­neers devised a mech­a­nism for pre­cisely repli­cat­ing a pianist’s tim­ing, attack veloc­ity, sus­tain, and release. In record­ing mode, it senses these para­me­ters opti­cally, thus impart­ing no change to the stan­dard piano action. In play­back, a key is struck by a sole­noid dri­ven by a power ampli­fier con­trolled by a cus­tom closed-loop ASIC. Some­how, they shoe­horned 88 of these mech­a­nisms into a normal-looking piano enclo­sure. It’s a per­fectly ele­gant, har­mo­nious mar­riage of high tech and old-world crafts­man­ship. It sounds great, and it’s even more fun to watch than a real pianist.

The only bum­mer is that the vir­tual pianist does noth­ing to protest the hotel management’s deci­sion to play the same song all day on infi­nite loop.