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Thank you for your reply, Plonky, well up to your usual standard.

awww... was just funning with ya, Claude.

I think the idea is worth exploring.

One problem is that the notes on the acoustic are generated instantly, so syncing it with a digital tone might be problematic. Think: Flight of the Bumblebee...

Could a processor keep up with the computation of the additional tone?

I doubt it, but a) I'm not expert in processing and b) they get faster every day.

Modern processing speeds are vastly faster than any required computation for a digital tone. Most, not all, rock singers, who perform live, use on-the-fly pitch correction for their voice.

Again I plead ignorance, but it seems impossible to me that MIDI hardware (key contacts) and software could keep up the a complex and very fast piece.

Midi uses a communication protocol of 31.25 kbaud. There are ten bits per packet, so you would need to able to play, assuming no packets were in use for other midi changes, 3125 notes per second to outrun it. However, if you used the damper pedal and had 32 notes playing simultaneouosly, you would have to slow down to about 97 chords per second.

It is an interesting point, but I`m not sure that this would be a problem. I should have thought that the situation would be roughly analogous to having a Midi tone generator triggered by a keyboard and there is no appreciable delay when you use an arrangement of this sort.

The thing about the use of Auto-Tune is it is designed to only correct one solo input, usually voice. It would become very complex when confronted with many simultaneous notes (inputs) and correct all of them instantaneously. A delay would be inherent, even before the delay from the speaker. I think that Steve is correct.

"All Things Considered" vocalists could often benefit from the technology!

Who wrote The Flight of Two Bumblebees, anyway?

You may be right, but from a processing standpoint, any good gaming video card can handle millions of full 3D rendering calculations per second. Any audio processing requirement sensible to the human ear, is trivial. Incindentally, the fastest supercomputer in the world, designed to look a single moment in the interior of a nuclear reaction, is made up of off the shelf video cards.

Apples and oranges... not talking about using
Auto-tune to figure out the note and correct it here..
the sensors will tell the processor what the notes
should be.

I really don't see how this would be any different than
hooking up a midi"ed" acoustic to a tone generator to layer
the sounds.

"Nonetheless it seems to me that it ought to be possible to produce an upright piano which has the sound of a high quality full size grand. Am I mad or does this idea have possibilities?"

Some of us can`t tell the bloody difference anyway . . . . there are some darned good uprights out there . . I played one in the "Queens Arms" in Barrow in Furness 40 odd years ago. It had neither back nor front. Beautiful to hear.

But nowhere to put my beer.

"Wouldn't you need well over 200 of them operating independently?"

Who`s counting? They`ll be mass produced in China . . .

Plinky, I`ve just laughed my arse off tonight . . . .

It has been a good night, hasn't it?

You and Jean are fun guys to mess with!
All in good fun!

What would be an improvement is to junk MIDI completely and utilze todays better and faster methods of communication. 128 bits of resolution? That's so 1980's.

Quid est veritas? -Indeed! A person after my own heart.

Unfortunately, MIDI is so pervasive and muscians so impoverished that few would be willing to throw away perfectly good 30 year old equipment for a possible improvement in the sound that none of the audience is likely to hear anyway.

I was reading this and thinking "who the heck
has 30 year old electronics...???"... then I
remembered: My D-50 is about 25 years old and
my SQ-80 is close behind... Thinking more about it
my piano is my NEWEST piece of music gear,
and she's 10 years old!

I have had to replace just about every piece of electronics I have bought since I got my piano, and my piano was over 50 years old when I bought it.

...and no maintenance or replacement parts in your piano?

Oh, yes, there has been maintenance, and replacement parts. The electronics were "obsolete," so there were no replacement parts available.