> What if you make a circular string and attach 1 or more oscillators at random points?
If your computer meets the system requirements, you could always install the free demo and build this sound ring instrument to find out! Building these kinds of weird ideas and seeing what happens is my favorite thing to do with it.
My RTX2080Ti (admittedly not a cheap card) supports 768 physics objects (masses) per each of 16 voices. And I think that beefier cards can do 1024. There are other limitations for performance depending on how the system is constructed, and I certainly don't want to claim that I know it can simulate a piano, but...
If your computer meets the system requirements, you could always install the free demo and build this sound ring instrument to find out! Building these kinds of weird ideas and seeing what happens is my favorite thing to do with it.