About This Tool
This tool processes KMD piano touchweight data and generates analysis reports including:
- Interactive Touchweight Curves - Explore individual key responses
- Friction Analysis - Detect problematic keys and outliers
- Aftertouch Analysis - Analyze general character and identify outliers
- Damper Lift Timing Analysis - Analyze general character and identify outliers
- Statistical Analysis - Mean values, standard deviations, and problem detection
- Visual Reports - Color-coded curves from bass to treble
- Sample Analysis - Feel free to download this Steinway A dataset and send it back through to see what comes out
What's Next
- Documentation - Lots of these stats are probably Normally distributed (in a statistical sense) Explain stuff like what the std deviation means in this situation. What's an acceptable stddev on friction? Aftertouch? Downweight? Hmmm. interesting questions.
- Debugging - This is beta, thrown together quickly with lots of other stuff on. Likely has bugs.
- Improvement - There are probably lots of tweaks that could make this analysis better. The aftertouch calculation, in particular, needs work. Suggestions welcome
- Machine learning - If I get enough data, it would be interesting to throw some high performance computing at it and see what sort of things some AI and/or machine learning can discern. There's got to be a lot of information hidden in the shapes of those curves.
- Key weighting - Might be able to figure out how much lead/TungSteel to put where on each key in order to get a desired Stanwood touchweight curve? (I guess we might need a bit more information here, such as the balance rail fulcrum positioning?)
- Dynamic touchweight/inertia - If we can get Renner to put a few more modes on the device that take measurements at different speeds, we should be able to figure out some inertial characteristics
Disclaimer
This is provided for informational purposes only. It's beta software and you are just helping test it.
Chances are it's only going to function reasonably if your piano is in reasonable condition.
If Renner change their data format from this device, this will break, and I will be unlikely to be able to be bothered enough to fix it.
I have no relationship to Renner or KMD people. I was merely asked to help set up an "Innovation Centre" at the APTTA convention in Christchurch, New Zealand Oct 3-5, 2025. The suggestion was that the KMD might be an interesting addition. I borrowed one and promptly went down a silly thought experiment rabbit hole, as you do. Now I need data.
Privacy
You are uploading data sets onto my server, and I want to see that data. So it becomes mine.
Please don't put any identifying customer details in the name of the file.
I don't want to know. After I strip all of that out I may use the dataset in a presentation sometime. I'll probably let you know before I do - particularly if you've given me your email address. Chances are I know you anyway.
There's a good chance that at some point I will send these data sets through some machine learning algorithms, but those will all be hosted in a closed system by something that I control, so data isn't going anywhere like to the Googles and Facebooks of the world.