A player piano for the digital age.

Byline: Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

This might be the world's biggest iPod.

Not to mention the most expensive.

That's not, though, how David Lawson describes the sumptuous looking 5-foot grand piano that's sitting - with a $34,195 price tag - on the showroom floor at Lawson Piano Center in Eugene.

"This is a highly successful marriage of acoustical craftsmanship and the latest in technology," he says.

"This" is a Yamaha Disklavier Mark IV, the newest in the piano company's line of what amount to highly sophisticated player pianos.

Like any player piano, the Disklavier has a certain creepy quality when it plays by itself - those keys and pedals going up and down all on their own, creating real piano music on real strings.

But unlike the player pianos of pizza parlor fame, which operated off a punched-paper roll that could basically hit a key at the right time, the Disklavier pianos use MIDI encoding, together with solenoids, fiber optic cable and an 80-gigabyte hard drive. That technology records and expresses 127 different aspects of each key stroke, from brittle and staccato to long and legato. That means a very fine reproduction of any particular piano performance that's been recorded on a MIDI piano. In fact, these pianos aren't called "player" pianos, but "reproducing" pianos.

The reproducing piano can be used for very basic instruction, Lawson notes; set it in teacher mode and, as you play a score, it will wiggle any missed key for you, as a hint.

The piano can play left hand while you play right, or vice versa. You can even switch off the acoustic strings and play the piano as an electronic keyboard; the computer-controlled music comes out of a pair of speakers.

The latest wrinkle in the Disklaviers is this: They're now connected to the Web. That means you can subscribe to DisklavierRadio, which sends music in a variety of genres over its 11 channels to your piano 24 hours a day.

And you can download tunes (see, here's the iPod connection) from the DisklavierMusicStore.

Yamaha's selections tend toward easy listening more than classical. When I looked up 19th century American composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk on the Yamaha Web site, all I found was a book of sheet music I could order - how very analog. The Yamaha site said, though, that the book was "compatible" with the Disklavier Mark IV.

On the other hand, I could download the piano version of "The Eagles Greatest Hits, 1971-75," for $17.95. "Our most popular Smart PianoSoft title," the site says.

Planning a dinner party? You can have soft piano music of your choice, perhaps even the Eagles, coming out of your piano the whole time.

The Disklavier also works as a very large and expensive clock radio: You can wake up to piano music of your choice at a preset time.

A more interesting possibility for the Internet-connected piano is exchanging live performances. Contestants in a competition, for instance, could perform on a Disklavier piano somewhere near home. The performance would also be recorded on video. Then the judges, who also could be anywhere in the world, could watch the video and listen to the computer-recorded performances as they played on their own concert Disklavier.

Indeed, the Minnesota International Piano-e-Competition does just that, allowing contestants and judges to be anywhere in the world.

"This also means you can work with a teacher clear across the U.S.," Lawson says. "The capabilities of this piano are just beginning to be touched."