Seems like it could be a part of OSM. And indeed, there's "amenity=piano" [1], as well as "musical_instrument=piano", with overpass-turbo [2] even finding some pianos using the latter.
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 Piano locations are impermanent structures and information can become outdated in just a few weeks.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).
Could it be synced back to OSM so that people can submit in your nicer interface but it'll flow back into OSM? I'm honestly not super familiar how open OSM is for things like that.
There's lots of prior art, such as https://wheelmap.org/ -- so I imagine OSM is somewhat open to this sort of thing. Might be worth looking at how Wheelmap edits OSM. I believe it's from a generic account and edits are tagged such to make it clear it's from a member of the public.
You could also implement OAuth (sign-in with OSM) to do edits, similar to how some tools like https://maproulette.org/ work, though you'll get less contributions if you don't have an option for anonymous public edits.
Not to mention that a lot of downstream projects using the OSM data set only update once every few weeks / months so by the time the data hits, its already old.
Kudos to the developer. This is a great idea. I’m traveling shortly, and always remind myself - don’t bring too much music gear, as there is ALWAYS a piano around somewhere.
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.
- If I search, I get local results. But expanding the map should bring in more results. After all, I can start with the world map and filter down to my area, so why not have the same functionality in reverse?
- Zooming in from the world map all the way to my towns, I see 2. If I click one, the map zooms out and puts their icons together. I have no idea how to see details on these.
- The search results only showed one. Why are the results better when not searching?
Still, great idea, if the experience can be improved.
Great idea! Small feedback: one of the pianos listed for Minneapolis is in Concourse C at the airport. While this is, in fact, an actual piano, you have to go through security to play on it. So I'm not sure if this counts as a public piano?
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.
Along those lines: this has happened exactly once in my life but man was it something, getting off a red eye at 6am and noticing a piano in the middle of the food court. Place was a ghost town except for the morning shift relieving the evening shift, a few food vendors setting up and us, the first arrival of the morning.
Guy a few feet ahead of me pauses, sits down, and unleashes a beautiful melody that stops everyone in their tracks.
There's an applause, he calmly gets up, and we all continue on our way.
That particular pianist, Paul Barton has a whole bunch of very nice renditions of various pieces, he lives in Thailand and seems to be a genuinely nice person as well based on the videos of him that I've watched. Two recommendations, the one is Bach's version of the adagio, the other the fugue part of 'Toccata and Fugue'.
And he is also a great painter and there is an awesome video of him painting a portrait of Josh Wright, who is a concert pianist that has lots of educational videos online.
One thing I love about watching Barton is that he has the hands of a mere mortal. So you can see how he accomplishes various reaches and fingerings if you don't have gargantuan piano hands.
The only listed piano in my town is in a hotel lobby. I haven't gone there, but I'd assume that counts as semi-public, they probably don't like if non-guests come and play.
A piano left outside is as good as dead. Weather is even more a threat than vandalism.
Then there's tuning. The piano needs to settle in to the going temperature and humidity. Low humidity will split soundboards and many commercial spaces in northern winters allow humidity to sag. So you need to schedule tunings to seasonal changes as the wooden components (soundboard, bridge, nut, wrench plank, etc) expand and contract with humidity changes.
Best to keep a public piano where somebody keeps an eye on it.
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.
They get donated because they have a dud key or cracked soundboard.
We have an antique German upright in our garage in Australia that we believe is untunable but don't have time or interest to pay to check. Can't give it away. At this stage, our best bet is to tear it apart with a crowbar and put it out for pick-up or feed it through the bin. Given it's likely varnished, can't even use it for firewood.
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.
Love the idea. But there's a snag. If I search for my town, I get a lot of “likely not available (last seen years ago)”. If I click on “recent”, I get entries from all over the world. It seems to me that being able to filter by both would be essential to be able to actually find a piano.
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.
I live a bit outside Boston, MA, and it brought up 2 results: one on martha's vinyard (a small island off the coast of cape cod) and one somewhere in a library in boston.
Was hoping for a few more results, esp. being near a large city.
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.
This one has a photo that links to a deleted/gone instagram post? Should the photo be taken down, for privacy? https://pianos.pub/piano/df042e84 Sorry to ask the hard questions.
This one as a video https://pianos.pub/piano/a9e918f3 of the piano right by the water but the map location is 2-3 blocks from the water. The piano in the video seems to be that guy's own piano, so not a public one? The guy plays a nice self-composed tune, at least.
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
While interesting, I don't have an ear for de-tuned instruments. And I don't think it's too much to ask to expect a public piano to be properly tuned to the traditional scale.
I probably know 3 songs on the piano, and would enjoy playing them for people much more than sitting alone analyzing the philosophies of music in front of a de-tuned piano.
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.
Germany and Deutschland are two unique countries on this list. Japan is doubled. Ukraine is doubled. Thailand. Israel. Spain. Lebanon. Armenia.
France has the special property of zooming out to the entire world map because there are multiple French territories located around the Caribbean islands. (Do French people have maps like the U.S.---where Alaska and Hawaii are an inset beside the contiguous states---that show all of the various French islands?)
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Two recommendations for improvement that unfortunately make a non-trivial amount of work:
* consistent localization (so many choices: all English names, all local names, local names for non-Latin alphabets, all English and local names with redirects, etc.);
* having true "find by location", because if you search for Saint Barthelemy, you get every listing from France.
* (bonus) test spell check results of "not found" locations. If I search Saint Bartholemy on the piano finder, the result is "No place found", while on Google Maps, it shows Saint Barthélemy.
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.
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)
[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Dpiano
[2] https://overpass-turbo.eu/