philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Robotic hand helps pianists overcome “ceiling effect”

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“I’m a pianist, but I [injured] my hand because of overpracticing,” coauthor Shinichi Furuya of Kabushiki Keisha Sony Computer Science Kenkyujo told New Scientist. “I was suffering from this dilemma, between overpracticing and the prevention of the injury, so then I thought, I have to think about some way to improve my skills without practicing.” Recalling that his former teachers used to place their hands over his to show him how to play more advanced pieces, he wondered if he could achieve the same effect with a robotic hand.

So Furuya et al. used a custom-made exoskeleton robot hand capable of moving individual fingers on the right hand independently, flexing and extending the joints as needed.  ...

A total of 118 pianists participated in three different experiments. In the first, 30 pianists performed a designated "chord trill" motor task with the piano at home every day for two weeks: first simultaneously striking D and F keys with the right index and ring fingers, then striking the E and G keys with the right middle and little fingers. "We used this task because it has been widely recognized as technically challenging to play quickly and accurately," the authors explained. ...

After two weeks, they were assigned to one of two laboratory groups, in which the robot exoskeleton hand passively moved those four fingers for 30 minutes to perform the chord trill—faster than the players could do so themselves. ...

The results: "Even when the skill plateaued after weeks of piano practice, passive training of the fast and complex motor skill with the robot further facilitated the maximum rate of repetitive piano keystrokes involving fast and complex multifinger movements," the authors wrote, and the training effect also showed up in the untrained hand, so there was an "inter-manual transfer effect." ...

See the full story here: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/01/robotic-hand-helps-pianists-overcome-ceiling-effect/