Piano playing transformed into Playstation controllers that play StreetFighter
The title, and even their own abstract, does not do this project justice. They did not simply map piano keys to a controller's buttons. About a quarter through the post:A simple solution would be to link every piano key to a controler button. This could be fairly easy to build, but seemed that it would lean way too much towards non-music, providing too much of a simple translation, instead of a metaphor. We wanted a system that would allow us to say: “If you’re a good pianist, then you’ll be a good gamer”. ... Simply put, we had to find a way to translate what a good pianist would play into what a good gamer would play.This talk then continues much later:To tackle this situation, we decided to adopt a clear and strict separation of concerns, in which our firmware would be conceptual center of command:* the single role of the piano is to play notes (key hits) * the single role of the console is to play controls (button hits) * the role of the pianette, our firmware, is to receive notes from the piano, somehow turn them into controls, and send these controls to the consoleThat became the basis for a refactor of the whole firmware.A one-to-one mapping from piano keys to controller buttons would be interesting, but not... satisfying. They really thought about this deeply, and mapped music to fighting.