Playing the piano is rewarding but challenging for many beginning pianists. To tackle this, we have developed an AI that listens and accompanies to the player, allowing co-creation of music performance between a beginning pianist and AI.

Our idea is to make the piano intelligent and make it the best partner who understands what and how a player wishes to play, instead of being just a mere instrument. We believed that AI had the power to realise this.

We exhibited an installation called "AI Music Ensemble Partner YOO" where everyone can enjoy playing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" at SXSW2018 and Yamaha global flagship store in Tokyo.

The budget was ¥15,000,000 JPY ($133,995 USD). 2,469 participants joined the campaign. Out of the participants, 700 answered our survey and 81% of them responded they wanted to play the piano again with YOO. The project received 400 million impressions through 178 media coverage.

Playing the piano is rewarding but challenging for many beginning pianists. To tackle this, we have developed an AI that listens and accompanies to the player, allowing co-creation of music performance between a beginning pianist and AI.

Our idea is to make the piano intelligent and make it the best partner who understands what and how a player wishes to play, instead of being just a mere instrument. We believed that AI had the power to realize this.

We exhibited an installation called "AI Music Ensemble Partner YOO" where everyone can enjoy playing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" at SXSW2018 and Yamaha global flagship store in Tokyo.

The budget was ¥15,000,000 JPY ($133,995 USD). 2,469 participants joined the campaign. Out of the participants, 700 answered our survey and 81% of them responded they wanted to play the piano again with YOO. The project received 400 million impressions through 178 media coverage.

We want to motivate people with little or no exposure to piano playing to enjoy playing the piano, by offering everyone the experience of playing a gorgeous sound on the piano and explore possibilities of musical expression.

Therefore, we developed a system "AI Music Ensemble Partner YOO" where everyone can enjoy playing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" with YOO, an interactive musical partner.

YOO appears on the screen as if it is sitting next to the players while they play and accompanying them so that they can fully enjoy the experience of playing the piano and exploring possibilities of musical expression.

To allow YOO to understand and respond to various ways that beginning pianists struggle with the piano or express themselves, we invented "AI Music Ensemble System" which analyzes player's playing style and predicts instantly and continuously the best way to accompany you.

Since 1887, Yamaha has not only created pianos but has been widely communicating the beauty of music experience through its development of music classrooms.

Also as the world's largest musical instrument manufacturer, we have actively brought technology into planning and development of acoustic musical instruments and have proposed new ways of enjoying musical instruments such as the world's first silent piano and grand pianos connected to the Internet.

Setting the piano inexperienced and beginners as the target audience, we sought for a way of how everyone could enjoy the successful musical experience and explore the possibilities of musical expressions, creating the future of piano experience.

Lowering the hurdles of performance will lead to an increase in the number of performers, resulting in Yamaha's positive branding.

We developed a system called "AI Music Ensemble Partner YOO" where everyone can enjoy playing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" with YOO, an interactive musical partner.

YOO appears on the screen as if it is sitting next to the players and accompanying them while they play so that they can thoroughly enjoy the experience of playing the piano and explore the possibilities of musical expression.

To allow YOO to understand and respond to various struggles that beginning pianists face with the piano or express themselves, we invented "AI Music Ensemble System" which analyses player's playing style to instantly and continuously predict the best way to accompany the player.

To allow as many people as possible to experience the installation, we exhibited at multiple venues for an extended period.

The installation was exhibited at SXSW2018 (2018.3.11~14) and Yamaha Ginza, our global flagship store in Tokyo (2018.4.25~5.22).

2,469 joined the campaign, and 700 answered the survey that 81% of them want to play again with YOO. Some comments included:

"...Really made me enjoy the playing experience so much more because I felt like I was a part of great music."

"...If I had this when I was a kid, I'd have never stopped playing. Just amazing."

Yamaha's corporate slogan is "Sharing Passion & Performance." We achieved delivering our message of "AI is something to co-create with" against the voices of "I might lose my reason of existence because of AI" around the world.

We received 400 million impressions through 178 media coverage sympathising with our message. Those media includes Engadget, Trend Hunter, Mostly Classic (classical music media,) PRIME News (Japanese news program,) Yomiuri and Nikkei (national newspapers in Japan,) and Highlighting Japan (the PR magazine of the Japanese government). The advertising value was ¥154,873,402 JPY ($1,372,376 USD).