30.03.06 Pianolina, the interactive piano.
Visiting the official website of a traditional piano-making company like Grotrian, you will be surprised by the presence of what is simply called 'game', the Pianolina, that is instead a real digital musical instrument. The invitation is to play with the floating tones, to create new atmospheric melodies and let yourself be fascinated by the charm of this interactive piano. The Pianolina, in fact, is an animated sequencer, developed with Flash, where gravitational law and chance influence the melody. Tones are represented by coloured squares that you can drag and drop into what you could call the physical space of performance, determining intonation and chords. You can play an unusual variation on Beethoven or create an original melody, fill the space with different sounds, or let the melody dissolve itself in a minimalist composition. It is interesting to notice how the language uses the same terms to describe sound and color, from tonality to note, from vibration to intensity. In the Pianolina the similarity between the frequency of sound and the light spectrum is confirmed and highlighted by the gravitational element, that brings the creation back to reality. If the sequencer has become the paradigm for interpreting reality, thanks to its structure that organizes flows of homogeneous information through a continuous scan, then the Pianolina, generator of random encounters between notes, is a good metaphor for entropy.
Valentina Culatti