The ‘auto piano player’ designed by Winfried Ritsch is a playing mechanism that can be mounted on any conventional upright or grand piano. A solid frame with 88 electromechanical fingers, which are moved using lifting magnets and can be controlled in parallel at different velocities, is mounted above the keyboard. This is controlled by computer-controlled microprocessors. This robot piano player, which is now in its third version, was built to surpass human players in some aspects - repetition rate, accuracy, and keys played in parallel... As an aesthetic principle, excessive performances are the main goal of the robot, which extends the virtuosity of any human player and allows them to interact with data streams other than notes.

‘This allows composers to realise the ‘unplayable’ for human beings, be it the most precise time structures, enormous speeds, different tempos at the same time or simply an incredible number of notes ...’ (Florian Gessler) This workshop will take the music machine as its starting point and look at machine music, as well as presenting various approaches and the latest software tools that encourage the auto piano player to give excessive performances.