Dream Jobs 2010: Hiroko Ohmura, Keyboard Maestro

In 2007, faced with fierce competition in the piano market, Yamaha drastically revised its business strategy. The new plan called for developing products that combined the company's acoustic and electronic expertise, two areas that had operated independently. The idea for the AvantGrand, a grand piano rendered in digital form, began to take shape. And Ohmura's career took a grand leap: Named project leader, she would be responsible for overseeing every detail of the new instrument.

Even for Yamaha, the world's largest manufacturer of musical instruments, the AvantGrand was ambitious. Ohmura's team started by taking a complete acoustic inventory of a traditional grand. Engineers placed a CFIIIS, Yamaha's top-of-the-line concert model, in a soundproof lab and attached it to a kind of robotic pianist. This machine pressed each of the 88 keys multiple times with varying force while the engineers sampled the notes from four locations within the cabinet. When you press a key on the AvantGrand, recordings of those samples emerge from the instrument's four midrange speakers, four tweeters, four subwoofers, and 16 power amplifiers.

Ohmura also supervised the construction of the piano's body. An acoustic piano is an intricate masterpiece of levers, weights, dampers, and hammers that hit strings to produce sound. The innards of the AvantGrand are similar, but instead of strings, its hammers hit padded rails; optical sensors capture each hammer's movements to trigger the notes. From the player's perspective, the keyboard action feels remarkably similar to that of an acoustic piano.

For added realism, the company fitted electronic resonators—two under the keyboard and two behind the music stand—that make the piano's keys, pedals, and cabinet reverberate like those of a real grand. As you play, you can literally feel the music flowing through your hands and feet.

"When I tried the first prototype," Ohmura says, "I almost cried."

Technology was just part of the challenge, she says. There was also the human side. Engineers in the acoustic piano division weren't used to working with their counterparts in the digital instruments division. It was up to her to bring them together. She held hundreds of meetings to champion the project and build consensus. Important negotiations also happened in the background, in what the Japanese call nemawashi, or laying the groundwork. To get it all done, Ohmura was at the office by 8:30 in the morning, sat in meetings for most of the day, and spent her evenings poring over market reports and customer surveys, usually leaving work after 10 p.m.

Her efforts paid off. "Our two divisions are very close now," says Roger Manners, a deputy general manager in the piano division. "She should be a politician," he quips.

And the AvantGrand, which hit showrooms last year, was an instant success. Whereas a 2.75-meter-long concert grand sells for over US $100 000, Yamaha's digital grand costs $20 000 and is just half the size. What's more, it never has to be tuned, and players can lower the volume or use headphones to avoid annoying the neighbors. Though concert pianists may not be ready to make the switch, Yamaha is awash in orders from conservatories and from piano enthusiasts with Tokyo-size apartments.

Ohmura is now working on a new keyboard project—"top secret," she says—and her routine is more frantic than ever. But she's not complaining. Quite the opposite. She enjoys the pace and the opportunities her job brings, she says, and she's always eager to meet the world-class pianists whom Yamaha invites to try out its new models. Jazz pianist Bob James liked the AvantGrand so much he used the piano in concerts throughout Japan last April. In the audience at his performance in Tsukuba sat a young Yamaha engineer, smiling to herself.

This article originally appeared in print as "Keyboard Maestro."