How Yamaha, Google, and Professor Alexander Braginsky Brought Technical Wizardry and Competitive Integrity Worldwide

Pianist hands at keyboard

By Katie Dohman

Around the turn of the century—that’s 1999—Professor Alexander Braginsky was dreaming about a better way to compete. 

“The more I went out as a judge, and participated in the process, the less I liked it,” he says. A competition where a judge had a student in the show would be the final straw. “It became clear to me that the only way to change the things that I don’t like in the system is to create something of my own. Because you cannot go around to other’s people’s events and competitions changing their rules. Like it or not! If you want a good dinner, cook,” he says. 

The first thing he thought of? He needed the best jury in the world to judge the participants. Among other people, he wanted to recruit pianist Yefim Bromfman. Bromfman was interested but he was in Japan. He told Braginsky if he could bring the recital to him, he’d do it. 

Oh, sure.

Well, a lightbulb indeed went off at that moment.

Braginsky had been, for many years, playing Yamaha pianos and fascinated by the technological advances Yamaha was continuing to bring to the market. 

Now he had access to a Yamaha piano that by all accounts seemed like a regular grand piano. And it is, but this version has this fiber optics built in. Through this technology, it registers every single motion that happens inside the grand piano—2,000 positions of any given key and 256 positions of the pedals. Then it records it, and plays it back. So when it plays it back, it’s not a recording, analog or digital, it’s the piano. Playing as you played it.

Braginsky asked Yamaha if it were possible for Bromfman to hear the competition in Japan, no matter where the contestants performed. They said yes. And then they “built a team of wizards” to actually make it happen. 

“So many things had to be created. They had to synchronize the video file with MIDI file in the piano, and all kinds of other things,” Braginsky says. “As a result, though, Bromfman sat in a singular hall in Japan similar to the one we conducted from; listening to the piano and watching contestants on the screen.” 

This new type of competition garnered immediate and steady interest. It made competitions more accessible with more students around the world and Braginsky is working to install more virtual audition locations worldwide to continue that. And the popularity was spreading on the Internet, too: tens of thousands of Internet viewers from 104 countries.

It didn’t take long for Google to come calling. They wanted to partner their Magenta Project—artificial intelligence—with Braginsky’s program. Magenta was asking: What is it exactly that makes one person sound different from another? These MIDI files—the piano’s registry of how the piano is played—might shed some light on that. Braginsky thought it a fair trade: access to the files for financial support for the hugely expensive endeavor.

“People of vision realize that this is something that brings us recognition that we could not buy for money,” Braginsky says. “Everybody is talking about it, and it brings the best students to the School of Music as a result of learning about our existence through competition. They must think, ‘If they have something that cool, must be a really good school.’ And they apply. That prestige is hard to overestimate.”

Cover of the 2019-2020 volume of Tutti Magazine.

Tutti. (Italian) all. every musician to take part.
Tutti is the annual magazine of the University of Minnesota School of Music.

Read the 2019-2020 volume of Tutti.

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