Quaver multiplayer piano records your jam and uploads to the web

The quaver piano is an interesting upright piano that at first glance looks like any other piano that you might have seen in a home or church around the world. The big difference is that the Quaver piano is very brightly colored and has some interesting buttons on the cover that hides the wires and turning board.

Quaver may have started life as your average antique piano, but the builders took some hardware and crammed it inside the piano to give Quaver a very cool feature. This piano allows anyone who happens by and wants to play to record their jam session, save it, loop it, and upload it to the internet.

The piano is able to do this thanks to a simple to use and understand interface powered by a Raspberry Pi 2. The idea is that one person can record a single portion of a song and save it. Up to three more people can then contribute their own parts to the song and then the entire layered sound can be uploaded to the web.

The music recorded loops back to allow players to hear it from an old pair of Bose speakers from the 80s crammed inside. One challenge that the designers had to overcome was how to record the piano music without recording ambient sounds from around the piano. The answer was to use specialized piano pickups that record only vibrations called Helpinstill pickups. A custom Linux kernel allows the piano to be ready to record in 2.9 seconds.

SOURCE: Hackaday