Steinway & Sons are the choice of nine out of ten concert pianists, as well as countless professionals and amateurs in the world. Since 1853, the company’s pianos – each of which takes around a year to make – have set an uncompromising standard for sound, craftsmanship, design, and investment.
The end of 2022 has marked a significant step in taking this world renowned and masterful company to the next step in musical creativity and technology with the launch of Spiriocast. Revolutionary new software allows live, remote performances from one Steinway & Sons Spirio | r piano to another in real time – no matter where in the world this might be. This genuinely transforms the experience of live, remote recitals, capturing every nuance of a pianist’s performance, developing software and hardware that faithfully reproduces the music on the finest acoustic pianos in the world.
Lang Lang with his wife,Gina Alice Redlingerand, playing a Spirio | r at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany (October 2022).
Spiriocast is a technology that allows the broadcast of high-resolution music data to Spirio I r instruments across the globe. The Steinway-patented proprietary sensor system captures the movements of the piano’s hammers and pedalling, and Spiriocast transfers the high-resolution data to recreate an identical, perfectly in-sync, unfiltered audio, video and acoustical experience on any number of connected Spirio I r instruments receiving the cast. Video and audio are captured by the iPad provided with each instrument and broadcasted over the internet in synchronisation with the music data. Whereas Spirio | r allows customers to record, edit, playback, search and save their performances, Spiriocast offers the opportunity to enjoy live concerts in the comfort of your own home in high-resolution and with the best sound quality.
Guido Zimmermann, President Steinway & Sons Europe proudly commented, “Spiriocast shows the power of innovation and how it helps us to stay relevant in today’s digitalised and connected world. It also offers music enthusiasts a unique experience – and, for all pianists out there, completely new creative possibilities.”
Spiriocast offers the opportunity to enjoy in your own home a musical acoustic experience unthinkable prior to Spirio.
Via an iPad, SPIRIO | r also allows listeners to access a vast library of music, virtually indistinguishable from live performance, including music and video of Steinway Artists, as well as Steinway Immortals including Duke Ellington, Glenn Gould, Arthur Rubinstein, and Art Tatum. Each month, the content library available on the Spirio app expands, automatically updated from the Cloud. Native to the Spirio app, the Spirio editor provides the world’s only advanced iPad-based high-resolution editing capabilities to Spirio files, preserving all of the music, allowing users to edit every nuance of their recordings.
Steinway & Sons have successfully harnessed technology to recreate and transmit a musical acoustic experience that would have been unthinkable prior to Spirio. All SPIRIO | r pianos around the world are ready for the software to be activated, and all other Spirio models will be eligible for upgrades in due course.
Words: Linda Hunting
Images: Franziska Krug/Getty Images for Steinway & Sons.
Show Comments +