- Roli has a new Piano AI Assistant to go with its latest instruments.
- The Piano AI Assistant offers personalized, real-time help and lessons.
- The AI is there to make learning and creating music more intuitive.
Piano teachers of both the strict and whimsical variety are a staple of movies and television, but music technology company Roli now offers a piano tutor built right into the instrument. The new Roli Piano features personalized AI guidance underneath the 49-key, $800 keyboard.
Roli’s Piano AI Assistant does exactly what it sounds like: It makes learning music more straightforward and fun than practicing alone. It can guide players through scales, explain ways of varying a tune, and even explain some music history in the context of specific compositions. It’s like having a music teacher who never gets tired and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject.
“In a few years time, it will seem antiquated that a piano or keyboard can’t help guide you, can’t see your hands and respond to them in many ways, and can’t have a conversation to help you,” Roli CEO Roland Lamb explained in a statement. “Today, we’re unveiling the new Roli Piano System that will help usher in this big shift.”
Music dreams
That Piano System is more than just the AI tutor and includes several features built into the keyboard. The Brightkey feature identifies the song you are playing and then lights the keys to guide you through notes and chords. Roli’s instruments also come with the Roli Airwave tool, which uses computer vision and AI to track hand movements over the keyboard, thus enabling the AI assistant to make specific corrections as you learn to play a new piece. Plus, the keys are sensitive enough to how they are played that they can mimic mechanical pianos in terms of bending pitches and other complex musical shifts.
These AI tools might serve to make music more accessible to a lot of people keen to learn piano. Instead of giving up after their first clumsy rendition of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” the AI assistant could encourage you to keep going. And for experienced players, the expressive features and personalized prompts can spark new creative ideas.
The $800 price tag is steep, but as these kinds of tools become more common, it’s not hard to imagine a future where music education leverages AI to give more people a chance to learn.
AI may not be music to every piano player’s ears, but it might be worth humming along with, at least.