Show HN: A website to find public pianos (opens in new tab)

I agree it could be part of OSM, but keeping it up-to-date is really tricky. Piano locations are impermanent structures and information can become outdated in just a few weeks. It would take a lot of effort to keep it up-to-date and there are very few people willing to put in that effort (i.e. "few" because the union of groups of people that love public pianos and like editing OSM is small).

Actually these are the best public pianos in my opinion - people often search for public pianos when they are traveling and travelers often enter/exit airports. Also the airport pianos are usually the best maintained.

Still better than the closest piano to me that it found, which is very clearly in a private residence. I wonder how its database was sourced.

I think it still belongs on the site since it’s public to anyone who has passed security.

Pre 9-11 public?

Data seems not to be consisent. If you click on Germany from the countries tab, it only shows 4 pianos for whole Germany and e.g. not the one in Berlin Stralau.

i have to say, it is a good piano there at schiphol :)

Thanks for the kind comment. Yeah I made this because I would fly a lot and want to play a piano (if no one was around). At the time there were only a few resources that listed possible locations of public pianos and they were always brief (maybe ~100 known pianos), so I tried to compile a more up-to-date thorough list. Its still not completely thorough as I personally find new ones all the time, and its not always correct as there is noise (as people have pointed out) but its still served me far greater than any other website has.

And if you're any good at all piano stores don't mind if you play, either! Every pianist must visit the Steinway store in Manhattan once in their life.

Thanks for the feedback.

Absolutely. I don't think I've ever played a playable public piano.

In fact, I remember last year I happened to be visiting Harvard Law School (I think Langdell Hall) and I saw a piano and I thought to myself that since it's in such a pretty building and in an elite law school, surely it'd be in good shape. Imagine my surprise when I discovered it was pretty much unplayable: totally not in tune, and at least 3 or 4 non-working keys.

At this point I think it would be a greater public service to offer digital pianos (if one does want to offer the public free-to-play pianos): they don't need to be tuned and a good one in this day and age is close enough to an acoustic piano. But if it must be acoustic for whatever reason, then for goodness' sake never place it outside.

Thanks I appreciate that! I'm always working to improve the UI

I agree, on a small phone (iPhone 12 mini) the icon is roughly 1/5 the width of the map itself!

Yeah I can see that Brooklyn has a lot that are very dated (2-5 years old).

I guess I didn't explain well that some of these pianos "no longer exist" but I find it really useful to still have that information because these locations essentially let you know that if there is a piano, it might be in this spot.

New York in general is really a difficult place to map because it changes so fast.

Broken pianos make the cut: https://pianos.pub/piano/2f90254f

What's a "playable state", though? Ryuichi Sakamoto challenges the notion of a singular acceptable state of the piano both on his album, 'async', as well as in 'Coda', the documentary about him.

"The industrial revolution made the production of an instrument like [the piano] possible. Several planks of wood - six I think in this case - are overlaid and pressed into shape by tremendous force for six months. Nature is molded into shape. Many tons of force and pressure are applied, making the strings what they are. Matter taken from nature is molded by human industry, by the sum strength of civilization. Nature is forced into shape. Interestingly, the piano requires re-tuning. We humans say, 'It falls out of tune', but that's not exactly accurate - matter is struggling to return to a natural state. The tsunami, in one moment, became a force of restoration. The [tsunami-damaged] piano re-tuned by nature actually sounds good to me now. In short, the piano is tuned by force to please our ears or ideals; it's a condition that feels natural to us humans. But from nature's perspective, it's very unnatural. I think deep inside me somewhere, I have a strong aversion to that." - Ryuichi Sakamoto

Thanks for noticing that - didn't realize those went away. Will fix.

By the way, Japan is probably the densest in terms of available pianos: https://pianos.pub/location/japan

It will say that without any recent confirmation that they exist. A public piano is not very long lived. Outdoors it will lose tuning quickly. Indoors still it needs continuous maintenance too. Many of these are short lived projects?

Most public pianos are fleeting - usually they eventually get vandalized or destroyed by weather. For this website, if its not seen again for a few months then its "likely not available" (but maybe worth a check)

:) Yeah there are a few "false positives". I flag them manually and have flagged this one so it will disappear soon...

Map based on that data: https://www.mapcontrib.xyz/t/e5c83c-OpenPianosMap (via https://github.com/brunetton/OpenPianosMap)

I think hotels these days would just be glad to have some life. Maybe you’ll buy a drink. Maybe you’ll entice others in.

Thanks for the bug report.

Thanks for the feedback. I get the confusion. If you searched for your town and only see "likely not available" there is likely none available and the "recent" would just be empty. I didn't make "recent" localized for that reason - for 90% of cities it will just be empty because there are only a few dozen new pianos each week. Instead of doing this I had "recent" show all recent so users can get an idea of how active the public piano scene is as a whole. In the summer there is up to 80 pianos a week, and the winter much less.

Trickiest part of anything like this. The valuable part is the dataset and that's what people will care about, but it's hard to get people to care without a decent dataset. Building a dataset (especially like this) is really tricky, and it seems like a website like this is the best way.

I first read your comment as meaning "I want to 3D print [something] that helps me find public pianos". I imagined printing something like a diorama of a city space with a little piano in there.

> Very disappointed that a few idiots can ruin something cool for the rest of us

This is a comment that is 'fractal' in nature, it is true at many scales.

That's too bad! Some cities are definitely more active in the public piano scene.

Mixed bag here in NL, some are absolutely terrible but most are actually quite good as long as they are not too exposed.