the rundown

Digital Kitchen wanted to see what would happen if an instrument was given the ability to have a conversation with its audience. We were inspired by the independent music scene and maker culture of the Capitol Hill neighborhood, so we devised a plan to re-imagine a forgotten instrument as a simple interactive experience. Stanley was born: the world's first interactive player piano. The perfect debut show presented itself right outside DK Seattle’s front door at the annual Capitol Hill Block Party. Stanley played song requests exclusively from Twitter for both live and live streaming audiences.

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The Building Blocks

We wanted Stanley to be an interactive player piano with a mind of his own. To do this we replaced his piano roll with electronics and hardware to allow each key to be controlled by a note in a MIDI file. Every song that Stanley played had to be created from scratch or modified from an existing MIDI file. To control the piano keys, facilitate dialogue with Stanley and field song requests, DK built a custom tool (STANDFORD) to manage social interactions from Twitter and the live crowd. This tool allowed Stanley's hardware to create playlists from Twitter requests and enabled multi-user control.
  •   Social
    Twitter
  •   Video
    Vimeo

The Votes

The Details

Agency
Targeted Regions
  • North America
Launch Date
July 20, 2012

The Team

  • Digital Kitchen www.thisisdk.com
  • Matt Mulder, Executive Creative Director
  • Eric Oldrin, Managing Director
  • David Mikula, Creative Director
  • Demetre Arges, Creative Director
  • Alaa Mendili, Creative Technologist
  • Ben Chaykin, Creative Technologist
  • Cara McKinley, Creative Technologist
  • Josh Hayward, Senior Creative
  • Koji Minami, Creative
  • Raul Villalobos, Creative
  • Dave Brown, Producer
  • Paul Williamson, Producer
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The Stats

  • 12 team members working on this project
  • 100 total hours spent on this project
  • 24.5M project impressions

The Results

Over the festival weekend, every tweet, crowd interaction and song played from Stanley were personalized and authentic. Stanley was not only emotionally accessible, but his Twitter account and live HTML5 video feed made him technically accessible around the world and across all devices. Thousands of people danced, laughed, argued, and fell in love with Stanley. In the end, Stanley resonated with thousands of people, blogs, and news outlets around the world totaling more than 25 million meaningful PR impressions. He still receives song requests to this day.

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