About

Playing the piano is one of my favorite hobbies, but I don’t usually enjoy reading music. Ever since I was little, I made up my own songs. These ephemeral creations are often played once and never recreated, which is part of their beauty to me. But ever since mobile phones became capable audio recorders, I started to capture some of what I played at the piano, often to listen to later for my own enjoyment.

When I moved into an apartment in Philadelphia last year, I got a digital piano controller for my birthday. This device has 88 keys and resembles a piano in almost every way but is not capable of making sound on its own. Instead, you connect it to a computer and download software that receives signals for each note you play and creates a realistic sounding piano performance. This way you can plug in headphones and not drive your neighbors crazy.

While the rich acoustics of an actual piano can never be truly reproduced, I realized the digital piano gave me the capability to transform my music-making approach. Instead of manually recording my improvisations with a low-quality phone microphone, I could now rig software to continuously listen to and record my every touch. Not only could I record high-quality audio that sounds pretty close to an authentic piano, I could also record each note I played and use that information later to visualize my performances.

As a software engineer, I took the idea of auto-recording my every performance to its absurd: why not create a website that is automatically updated every time I play a new song on the piano? That way I would only have to think about playing the piano, and then anyone, anywhere in the world would be able to listen to what I played within minutes. This website is my own art experiment manifestation of that idea.

Style

I often describe my piano-playing style as classical or classical-romantic, but I often dip into other styles, like jazz, pop, and experimental. The songs on this website are not perfect, pristine pieces with brilliantly planned out structure -- rather, they are most often the result of me making something up on the fly.

With that said, expect many songs to be choppy, expect many songs to borrow motifs from other songs, expect me to quote popular music sometimes if that’s what’s in my head at the given time. This kind of thing is not for everyone, but I find it usually makes for relaxing study music.

Technical details

Each song is performed on a Kawai VPC1 digital piano. The audio is rendered with Vienna Symphonic Library’s Vienna Imperial software, which is itself a meticulous sample collection of the Bösendorfer Model 290 Imperial grand piano. To capture note signals, I used the archive feature of Pianoteq software. After each performance, the REAPER digital audio workstation is used to render performances from MIDI to audio. Then, the MIDI and audio data is uploaded to Google Cloud storage. I wrote the software myself to automatically render and upload after each performance.