Pianist hacks instrument and uses it to play video games instead

Well, it’s not often that one gets to write a line like this: a pianist has hacked a piano for the purpose of using it to control his character in the video game, Tekken .

The Mozart-hacker is actually Geoffrey Guterl, and the way in which his system works is the piano sends a MIDI signal to an Arduino. Depending on the signals it receives, the Arduino then triggers transistors which, in turn, trigger inputs on a Paewang Printed Circuit Board.

The PCB is an arcade stick, and it’s hooked up to an Xbox360 (it does work on a PS3, too) which is running the game.

As you can imagine, playing the game doesn’t exactly sound like Piano Sonata in C, K 545; rather, the limited controls and repetitiveness of movements make for a rather small selection of sounds. Still, it’s a pretty cool execution of hacking skill.

Check out Guterl’s work in the video below:

For those thinking Guterl’s piano-hack looks strangely familiar, you’re right. Back in September 2013, a video made its way across the interwebs that showed a piano that was hacked to play the game, Doom .

But where Gurterl did his work on his own, it took a group of technology veterans to put the Doom instrument together. Explaining how they made their controller, a combination of copper tape and I-PAC keyboard encoders was used to allow the keys on the piano to interact with the computer, while a screen on the front of the piano showed the game itself.

Of course, if you want to go way back to the early days of hacking random objects for the purpose of controlling a video game, you have to go back to the YouTube video below, which shows a game enthusiast using a fishing rod controller to beat the game, Soul Calibur .