The title, and even their own abstract, does not do this project justice. They did not simply map piano keys to a controller's buttons. About a quarter through the post:<p><i>A simple solution would be to link every piano key to a controler button. This could be fairly easy to build, but seemed that it would lean way too much towards non-music, providing too much of a simple translation, instead of a metaphor. We wanted a system that would allow us to say: “If you’re a good pianist, then you’ll be a good gamer”. ... Simply put, we had to find a way to translate what a good pianist would play into what a good gamer would play.</i><p>This talk then continues much later:<p><i>To tackle this situation, we decided to adopt a clear and strict separation of concerns, in which our firmware would be conceptual center of command:</i><p>* <i>the single role of the piano is to play notes (key hits)</i> * <i>the single role of the console is to play controls (button hits)</i> * <i>the role of the pianette, our firmware, is to receive notes from the piano, somehow turn them into controls, and send these controls to the console</i><p><i>That became the basis for a refactor of the whole firmware.</i><p>A one-to-one mapping from piano keys to controller buttons would be interesting, but not... satisfying. They really thought about this deeply, and mapped <i>music</i> to <i>fighting</i>.
This guy beat Dark Souls with a drum controller: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02my_zhX4Bs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02my_zhX4Bs</a>
It would have been even better if they had been able to rig it so that the commands to operate the game roughly followed the rules of classical harmony, that way, the gameplay would be more obviously musical. As it is, it sounds a bit atonal.
Awesome work! Reminded me of this: <a href="https://www.threadless.com/product/1773/" rel="nofollow">https://www.threadless.com/product/1773/</a>