I.The instrument
Piano 1024 turns the keyboard you type on into a two-manual piano. The bottom letter row
plays the lower manual's white keys and the home row above it plays the black keys; the top
letter row and the number row form the upper manual. The two join without a gap or an
overlap — the lower manual ends on E4, the upper picks up at F4 — so your QWERTY board
becomes one unbroken keyboard from C3 to C6, thirty-seven keys, three octaves, before the
arrow keys shift you two octaves further in either direction.
Seven voices are on the strip above the keys: the signature Piano 1024 sound, a warm
Concert Grand, a Bright Grand that cuts through a mix, a Glass E.Piano, a
Harpsichord that ignores dynamics the way a real one does, a Celesta, and a
Drawbar Organ that sustains while held. Every one of them is synthesized live on your
device — the page ships no samples, no plugins, and uploads nothing you play.
It is free, needs no account, and also lives inside ChatGPT and Claude as an in-chat app:
Piano 1024 for ChatGPT & Claude.
II.Playing it — a short guide
Pedals. The space bar is the sustain pedal and shift is the
una corda. Both come in two
modes: hold, momentary like a real pedal, and latch, where each tap toggles the
pedal hands-free. Click the Sustain or Una corda label in the console to switch modes; your
choice is remembered for next time.
Dynamics and register. Computer keys are switches, so there is no touch velocity — instead
the up and down arrows step the whole instrument from pp to ff, and the left and
right arrows shift the octave. Tab cycles the voice. Escape is the panic button: every note off,
both pedals up.
Recording your playing. Press return (or click Record) and a lamp blinks while a timer runs;
the label reads “Recording · ⏎ stop” so you always know the way out. Stop, and two
chips appear. ↓ wav is the actual synth output — 16-bit, 48 kHz stereo, reverb tail
and all: what you heard is what you get. ↓ mid is a Standard MIDI File of the
performance itself — your notes and velocities, the sustain pedal as real CC64 data, una corda as
CC67, and the active voice written as its General MIDI program, with a program change landing
mid-take if you switch voices. Drop it into any DAW and re-voice your take with a sampled grand.
Both files are made and downloaded entirely on your device.
Big chords. Most laptop keyboards can only report about six keys at once — a hardware limit
called rollover. The pedal sidesteps it: latch the sustain, roll the voicing note by note, and
every string keeps ringing.
Mouse and touch. Clicking a key plays it; drag across the keys for a glissando. On a
touchscreen every finger is tracked on its own — see the phone notes below.
III.Born in eight minutes & three seconds
On the afternoon of June 13, 2026, this piano did not exist. Eight minutes and three seconds
after a two-sentence prompt to an AI coding agent, it did — two manuals, pedals, dynamics,
equations for strings, and a name it had given itself. It needed exactly one correction, and
everything since has been thirty-eight small asks in plain language.
The whole story, with the first-day screenshots →
IV.Where the sound comes from
Not a single audio sample: every note is assembled the instant you play it, from sine
partials and the physics of a struck string — the hammer's landing point, the sharpened high
partials that make a piano sound like a piano, two strings beating almost in tune, a breath
of hammer noise, and a small synthesized hall. It is why the page opens in an instant: the
samples would have weighed megabytes; the equations weigh nothing.
How the recipe works, voice by voice →
V.On a phone, & inside your AI chat
On a touchscreen the piano tracks ten fingers with no rollover limit, and added to your home
screen it opens full-screen like a native app, nothing installed. It also has one more home:
inside ChatGPT and Claude, as a small in-chat music studio — a playable keyboard right in the
conversation that plays what you name, teaches songs phrase by phrase, keeps a metronome, and
runs ear-training drills.
The phone flow, and the one-minute connector setup →