ephemeralization

http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13208736

Pianos are being replaced by digital replicas. The lead of this story, though, is that Yamaha has gone to great lengths to get the player's experience to mimic that of playing an analog grand piano, as well as the concertgoer's.
The first implication from this goes along with the digitization of car steering, chemistry labs, cameras, warehouses, and dozens of other information capture and transformation processes. I'm certain there are a few processes which will always continue in the old, direct, mechanical way, but it's increasingly clear that it's not easy to tell which side of the line any given object will fall on.
The deeper implication is that a professionally trained piano player doesn't feel right without the characteristic motion of the keys and the hammers, and they are even sensitive to the vibrations strings cause in the piano body. Now that the sound coming out of the piano has been decoupled from the mechanisms which produce those experiences, there is a new degree of freedom in producing a musical instrument. What kind of music would a concert pianist produce if the vibrations in a piano's body were the inverse of the notes played? What if the keys had two click-points, could be pulled upwards as well for a different effect, or had a variable resistance setting? What if notes played on one instrument could be mapped onto and come out of another instrument, or if another surface entirely - like a door or a table - could become an instrument, or if another device like a coffee machine or a printer could be fitted with such experiential, force-feedback controls?

Too many options - who has a way to narrow them down into a world that makes sense?