It seems like it should be pretty simple to just record the sound of a concert grand and play it back on a speaker. In fact, that’s what we do for studio albums. Is it the sustain pedal that causes the main difference in sound between an acoustic and a digital? Or would playing both without the pedal still sound different? I actually own a pretty sophisticated digital piano, the Kawai CA49, and it sounds a lot better than cheaper pianos, but I probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between it and an upright acoustic.
In: Engineering
The challenge is in all the effects of the body of the piano and sympathetic vibrations. Lets break the sounds down a bit.
First, take any single key, that has to have a hundred+ velocity (how hard you hit) variations to sound convincing. A single key press vibrates the soundboard and wood in unique ways per note. It also gets sympathetic vibrations on other strings.
It starts to get complicated when you add additional notes because there are ways those vibrations interact to boost or cancel each other. Wood isn’t perfectly predictable. It was a living thing with different densities across its grains. There is probably even some effect of the air acting as a mild natural compressor, though I think that must be subtle.
And then you multiply that by those 100+ states of velocity, across how ever many notes you hit, each with their own velocity.
So you get quickly to a point where the amount of samples in play would be quite a lot. There are ways it can be algorithmically approximated, and Ive heard recent ones that are pretty convincing.
And all of that is an easier instrument because notes in a piano forte are hit one way. Guitar, for example, you can hit the strings in dozens of discernibly different ways.
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