About
Welcome to pianos.pub: Music Hiding in Plain Sight
Meet the living community map that helps musicians and curious travelers find public pianos around the world.
Somewhere between the place you are and the place you are going, there may be a piano waiting for you.
It might be tucked beside a library desk, rolled under the roof of a train station, painted in impossible colors at the edge of a park, or sitting quietly in an airport terminal. Some public pianos are permanent neighborhood fixtures. Others visit for a summer and disappear before the weather turns. All of them briefly turn an ordinary shared space into somewhere music can happen.
That is the idea behind pianos.pub: make those instruments easier to find, and make what we know about them more useful to the next person.
A map made from sightings
pianos.pub is a worldwide catalog of publicly accessible pianos. Every point begins with a sighting: someone encountered an instrument, recorded where it was, and shared enough detail for another person to recognize the place.
A listing can include:
- the piano’s position on a map;
- a venue, landmark, or address;
- photographs from one or more sightings;
- notes about how to find or access it;
- recent reports about whether it is still available; and
- comments from people who visited.
That history matters because public pianos move. A piano that was outside a café last year may now be indoors, in storage, or gone. A station piano may only be accessible during opening hours. A community art project may last a single season. The map is not meant to pretend that every old sighting is current; it keeps the history while giving recent visitors a way to say what they found.
For planned trips and lucky detours
You can use the map with a destination in mind. Search for a city, station, address, or landmark and see what has been reported nearby. You can also share your location to look within 50 miles.
Or you can wander. Browse the world map, open the recent additions, or let the random page introduce you to an instrument somewhere unexpected.
Each route through the site answers a slightly different question:
- Find asks, “What can I play near this place?”
- World asks, “Where have public pianos appeared?”
- Recent asks, “What has the community found lately?”
- Random asks, “Where should curiosity take me next?”
You do not need an account to explore or contribute. If you visit a listed piano, a quick Yes or No availability report can help everyone who comes after you. If you find one that is missing, you can add it to the map.
A small invitation
Public music works because people make room for one another: the person who places the instrument, the person who maintains it, the stranger who plays, the stranger who stops to listen, and the traveler who leaves a useful note.
pianos.pub is a record of those small invitations. The catalog will never be perfectly complete, and that is part of its charm. There is always another corner to check, another piano to hear, and another report that can make the map a little more alive.