Viscount International has gone on somewhat of a scientific vision quest over the last seven years. Their goal was a new world of physical sound modeling, enabling an electronic keyboard with an improved means of recreating a wide variety of piano sounds.
Their brand Physis Piano – and in particular the new V100 model – is the culmination of those efforts.
"Some companies claim 'physical modeling,' but they are actually only modeling reverbs or ambience (not the actual sound)," says Physis Piano's North America director, Gary Girouard. "Other companies are only modeling a handful of sound properties. This is still great technology, but what really makes Physis stand out are the number of parameters it is using to craft a piano sound."
The idea behind the V100, and the company's approach to modeling in general, is rooted in research conducted by three Italian universities who have spent thousands of hours studying the details of acoustic properties and testing mathematical algorithms.
"For example, a concert grand piano was placed in the sound studio/lab of the University of Ferrara," says Girouard. "Hundreds of microphones were utilized and, over several years, volumes of data were recorded and analyzed. The goal was to create a set of parameters that could be used together to formulate the physical model reproduction."
Perfecting each parameter was extremely complex, but the company can now boast factors like hammer mass, string length, and soundboard size as elements that its products can calculate. Girouard says that traditional techniques for piano sounds – sampling, wavetable synthesis – don't match up to this new method's expressiveness. He points to detailed pieces of the puzzle like key velocity, restrikes, and sympathetic string resonance that Physis has tackled.
The V100 includes six sound families (Piano, E. Piano, Mallet, Keyboard, Ensemble, Bass/Guitar), a MIDI recorder, USB port, a multi-touch panel interface with a high resolution display, wooden ivory keys, 2 GB of internal memory, and more.
Physis plans on rolling out the V100 at a small number of piano specialty retailers, in part due to the experience and knowledge necessary on store's staff in order to work with the product. "There is a price-premium for this level of technology and innovation, so it takes knowledgeable staff to sell," he says. "The strategy is to partner with retailers who grasp and demonstrate the key advantages."
physispiano.com
