Siri Hack Allows Siri To Play Piano

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Of all the tech blogs, on all the web sites, in all the internet, this one had to walk into mine. Siri’s got a new trick for us today by way of a hack perpetrated by, of all places, Yamaha, to control its Disklavier piano. And what Yamaha managed to do is get Siri to tickle the ivories in a fashion you’d never expect something without fingers to manage to pull off.

The Disklavier piano, you see, is a kind of modern-day player piano, with the expected extras included. And what Yamaha did here was basically get Siri to communicate wirelessly with an AirPort Express, which was in turn connected to the Yamaha Disklavier. Thus, when you tell Siri to play a song, it will check your phone for that song, convert the song to a MIDI file, and send the resulting MIDI information to the piano, which converts it to key presses and pedal pushes. The Disklavier even allows you to see the keys being pressed and the pedals being pushed down just like you would see on a regular piano, which is a common feature of the player piano.

Basically, Siri is now playing a piano from across a room and while inside a small box. And the YouTube video Yamaha put up for this one (which we have below for your convenience) shows Siri not only knocking out Jon Schmidt’s Waterfall, but also Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and even, as the lead paragraph references, As Time Goes By from Casablanca.

Having seen Siri been hacked to do any of a number of things, and posited to do several more, it’s frankly not out of line to see it do something like this. Admittedly, it’s a bit more optical illusion than actual achievement, but the concept is certainly exciting, and adds just one more thing that Siri can do to an already extensive list of things like changing television channels and adjusting thermostats or changing the settings on your iPhone 4S.

So what do you guys think here? Useless hack? Or interesting display of what Siri can really do? What would you like to see Siri do? What do you think it will be made to do next? Lots of room for discussion here, and we’ve got the perfect place for you to do just that down in the comments section below!