It is indispensable to say that piano is one of the instruments that offer the maximum amount of freedom in performances due to their wide range and their abundant emotions of each note.
However, being single instruments, pianos are still not enough to create the desired emotion or to directly imitate special timbres in many situations, one of which is stage performances behind the curtains: being the accompany piano player for many stage performances, while controlling the melodies and chords are indeed helpful to build the atmospheres, their mono-timbre is a huge drawback. There was once a scene during a high school stage performance, which required me to highlight a spooky and mysterious emotion, but employing augmented chords and whole-note scales were not sufficient to let audiences to have goosebumps.
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As a music-technology-concentrated student for now, I came up with a piano-electronic-acoustic piece employing computer sound effects. Specifically, with a laptop executing a Max MSP patch, and a foot pedal working as a "remote space bar", what I could do during the performance is, whenever I step on the pedal, the patch plays the next clip of a pre-made, Max-MSP-processed sound effect while performing the piano.
The music starts with fast ascending dissonant chords, changes its tones and tempos quickly and freely as it develops in the middle, but eventually resolves to harmonic chords at the end, symbolizing the theme of "The Justice Defeating the Evil: with the bad glittering light went out, the harmonious glittering light replaced it".
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The following is the screenshot of the Max MSP patch of the controller. The "key-select 32" command on the top-left corner listens to the banging information sent by the foot pedal.
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