This is a talking piano and it's so cool and his name is chopsticks. So, in addition to talking, he could play simple songs like that, but also like really complicated songs. So today, not only will we just so, why do you? Why do you need people to pay to play the piano if the piano can do that? Science behind making a piano speak human, but later he's going to play the drums for us and sing for us not yet chopsticks. Remember, for my videos that song usually comes a little bit later.

That's my question. Anyways then he's gon na attempt to play the world's most complicated digital piano song from sheet music boss rush e there's a reason. This song has never been played with an actual real-life piano, so i've legitimately got a couple fire extinguishers on hand in case the whole thing goes up in flames, but before we get to any of that, we need to first understand the really cool engineering behind how Pianos even work, because if you look at the guts of this modified see-through piano for something that was invented by an italian dude 300 years ago, you can see it's pretty complicated and it's the same thing. If you zoom in and just isolate on a single key.

This is what's happening every time you push down on the white part, if you're thinking like an engineer, you know the best design is always the one that gets the job done in the most simple way possible and when i first saw this no offense to bartolome Christofori, the inventor of the piano it just seemed overly complicated. I mean the first piano i ever played was pretty dang simple like. Why can't you just have a class one lever where, when i push down here, there's a full crimp in the middle and it hits the string here well, it turns out there's two problems with that right off the bat. The first is that the hammer remains in contact with the string when you hold the key down.

That means the string isn't free to wiggle and vibrate, which is how the sound is created like with this guitar makes sense. It sounds great until you touch the strings and now because it can't vibrate, you don't hear anything. In fact, you can see that's exactly the problem with this toy piano. The second problem is, this is an upright piano, so the strings must be vertical to fit, but that's an easy enough fix if we shift them here and add an extra hinge point.

However, you'll notice we're still damping the string and, as you can see, the piano should continue making sound, even if i'm holding the key down. So how do we do that? Bartolio got real, clever and added a little extra hardware here. So now, when you press the key this jack flings the hammer forward, so it hits the string, but then the jack gets its foot caught which moves it out of the way. So the hammer can move back and not dampen the string fun fact.

Most people think pianos are considered string instruments, but this hammer-like action is why they're actually classified as percussion like a gun. Okay. So now, if i press the key down, it will continue to make noise but wait if i let my finger go. The sound should stop.

So something is damping that string. But if you look in our current build, you can see if i let the key go, there's nothing to stop the string from just continuing to vibrate and make sound to solve this bartolomeo added an extra pivot point and some more hardware. So now you see this damper rests on the string and keeps it quiet until you press the key down, then the hammer strikes, then it's free to vibrate and create noise all the way up to the moment the key is released. And finally, if i want to play note really quickly and repeatedly like this, i need the hammer to be close to the string and not way back here like this.

So by adding this back stop it keeps the hammer close after each hit in case. I need to quickly hit it again, so there you have. It apologies to my fellow engineer, bartolomeo. It turns out it's only as complicated as it needs to be, and no more.

It's also sort of simplistically beautiful that all that functionality is from only one input. Every time you press a single key now chopsticks here is a special case, not only because they see through themselves, have been around for over 100 years, but there's an important difference here. An old player piano works by scrolling through a paper sheet like this and when it encounters a hole it passes, air through which plays the key. So all the keys are played at full force and the timing isn't very precise, whereas chopsticks here is a modern version that uses a solenoid to actuate the key we place the solenoids right here so when the rod extends it's no different than someone actually pressing.

The key you can see them all lined up along here, but with solenoids. Not only do you get your timing down to fractions of a second, but you have 127 different levels of increasing force to press a piano key, which means you can make perfect recreations of a human player. So here's my friend andrew from the youtube channel sheet music boss playing so why play that he's shanty and then recording and then chopsticks uses that midi to play it back perfectly. Only since he's not limited to better fingers, the songs can get more complicated.

What it's! Why i stopped playing chess, so i did it if they can do it better better than that, because those 88 precision solenoids allow them to make crude reproductions of entire bands, see if you can pick out the singer's actual voice in this classical piece of music history And so now that we know at least partially what he's capable of before we attempt rushi, let's quickly discuss how we actually make chopsticks yeah, i can aim better, but it's how you use your aim if you're creative, to make plays that make the aim work, you Can actually do better than an aimbot speak insane chopsticks, that's better, and to do that. I'm gon na pass it over to my buddy grant from the youtube channel three blue one brown for a simple explanation. The signals from speech can be visualized with a waveform which you might think of as telling oh, my god pressure next to a microphone as a function of time. If you zoom in on a little window of it, you might notice.

It looks like a rhythmic repeating pattern. As it happens, one of the most delightful facts from math tells us that for pretty much any signal, you can express it as a sum of pure sine waves which, in the context of sounds, correspond to pure pitches, higher frequency sine waves, giving you higher pitches. If you want to perfectly reconstruct the original signal, this often requires adding a very large number of pure sine waves, each with a different height. Now a favorite tool in signal processing is something called a fourier transform repeat after me, it's interesting now i do have to come clean and admit that i am cheating a little bit by putting the words.

Chopsticks is speaking up on the screen as humans. Eighty percent of the information, our brains gather about our surroundings, comes from our sense of sight and so, as our dominant sense, our brain really leans on our eyes, even when processing what we hear, if you don't believe me, here's two tests you can do right now Go back and re-watch any part of this video where chopsticks is speaking only this time close your eyes and see how much now you can't you can't, i guess we always. We always seem to do a little bit, but this dude is to understand him and number two. Maybe you've heard this audio clip from some random videos.

It is literally impossible. When does he talk over here right anyways, then he's gon na attempt to play the world's most complicated digital piano song from sheet music boss and his name yeah, it's impossible! Look at that! Look and his name. You don't you guys, it's impossible. You heard it no shot, stop no shot man.

What else do you talk? I'm too lazy blade at what time to this other clip that says brainstorm only as you might have guessed. Those are the two tests word green needle from our sense of sight, and here, if you don't believe me, here's two tests, you can do right now, number one go back and re-watch any part of this video where chopsticks is speaking. Only this time close your eyes and see how much harder it is to understand him and number. Two.

Maybe you've heard this audio clip from some random 80s toy, saying the word green needle now. Compare that to this other clip that says brainstorm only as you might have guessed, those are the exact same audio clip which is bonkers, because those two words don't even have the same number of syllables for proof, i'll repeat it twice more only this time you can Randomly pick a word to look at each time, ah the to look at each time. No, no! I i heard brains on this diamond hold up, or only this time you can randomly pick a word to look at each time. Hold up hello, wait a minute! Only this time you can randomly pick a word to look at each time off all right guys, you guys guys you guys, you can also pre-fire to look at each time.

Okay, i guess you guys are pre-fired. Okay. If you look at brainstorm first and forget about it and you read, green needle you'll still hear brainstorm because i pre-fired it because i saw in someone i was like no, no, i want green needle, but i heard brainstorm because i had it locked into my head: Try it repeat it twice: okay, look at the bottom word read it read it read it and then say: i'm gon na read the top one. Instead, try it right now or only this time, you can randomly pick a word to look at each time boom.

All right, and so now for the big finale in a world's first way. Oh sorry, for the big repeat it twice more only this time you can randomly pick a word to look at each time, all right, so now the big finale in a world's first exclusive. I present an actual piano attempting to play the world's hardest song rush e guys. You probably only hear one of them because your mind is still on one another like like the mass, your your hearts, talking yourself on one word and it's still in your head as the the words gon na come out.

So of course, you're you're bricked cause you're. Breaking yourself, dumb boy, what do you say? What is here hold up sorry attempting to play the world's hardest piano song rush e, nice gibberish? Of course buddy. Good luck, e! I think this is drawings. All i do is crackling wait.

Why is there audio crackling in this? What the biggest problem with me, making a youtube video to try and teach you something is that it's just not very interactive, which is why i'm pleased to say my friends at brilliant.org, who just so happen to be supporting this video have solved this issue and if You don't know: brilliant is a problem-solving website and app that has over 60 courses, including topics in math science. Science is all about making the content interactive, which is way more effective at building your intuition, my favorite one so far is their scientific thinking course, where, instead of memorizing specific formulas that interactivity builds intuition about general principles, you see in the everyday world around you got It that's wicked, we love it. That's cool um tonight.