Alpange’s high-tech piano makes its New York debut. Does it hit the high notes?

This eccentric instrument is the brainchild of Raphaël Soudre and Franck Bacquet, two French musicians and innovators who wanted to give the traditional piano a radical makeover. The Alpange Piano was on show this week in New York as part of the Sanford L Smith + Associates’ Salon Art + Design 2024 at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City, where it took pride of place in the ‘Parlor’ installation by design studio FrenchCaliforna.

Bacquet and Soudre set up their company in 2023 and now hand-make the Alpange in Nantes, using a selection of premium woods depending on your favoured finish. These include walnut, maple, and deep ash, with the piano, stool and even the integrated music stand all using the same simple form language.

Underneath that handcrafted skin is a digital piano, naturally, although the electronic innards are carefully concealed within the very analogue outer shell. The Alpange is distinct from conventional digital pianos in that it uses modelling technology, rather than replaying a series of pre-recorded samples. The modelling algorithms respond to the physical inputs of the player, not just the pressure of their fingers on the keys, but the perceived weight and resonance of how a hammer might strike a string and the sympathetic resonances between different notes.

All this is replayed through the 14 high-fidelity acoustic diffusers that are embedded within the case. With volume levels that reach 105 dB – equivalent to a concert grand – the Alpange offers up studio quality sound without the need for tuning and in a far more compact, portable package (anyone who’s had to hire a piano mover will be sympathetic to the latter).

That also means the Alpange piano can offer a huge variety of sound. The company provides a dedicated app, Alpange Peaker, which allows you to modify the timbre and dimensions of the sound, as well as record content from the piano itself (there’s an integral microphone in case you fancy your combined keyboard and vocal skills). Finally, you can use the Alpange as a form of high-end player piano and simply have it tinkle away in the background.

The Alpange piano illustrates a trend towards ‘invisible technology’ in the way it presents and repackages readily available technology. Digital pianos, even modelling pianos, have been around for decades, all of which demonstrate much the same functionality. Claims like ‘every note played is saved automatically in the piano’s infinite memory’ hand-wave away the simplicity and ubiquity of MIDI, one of the most efficient of all modern data formats, introduced way back in 1983 (a back-of-the-envelope, AI-assisted calculation suggests that the complete works of Beethoven would only take up around 50MB of disc space).

Clearly an Alpange is just as much about craft and style as it is about musicality and performance. In that respect, it’s a big player in a much smaller field.

Alpange Piano, more information at Alpange.com, @Alpange
Salon Art + Design at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, 7-11 November 2024, TheSalonNY.com