Bayerova Piano is the six-voice sampled acoustic piano in Sonic Fauna. It takes its name from Bayerova Street in Brno, where I recorded the piano that became its source.

Sonic Fauna is a desktop app for algorithmic and emergent music: instruments meet patterns, systems, and chance, and familiar sounds can wander into places you would not plan by hand. Bayerova gives those patterns an acoustic starting point. Play softly and the notes are darker and linger; play harder and they open up. A modulated delay adds a slow sway, filtering shifts their distance and color, and sample-rate reduction roughens the tone. The piano can stay recognizable or fray into something less certain.

The piano on Bayerova Street

I was in Brno, Czech Republic, for a short vacation with my dog. I knew the Airbnb had an acoustic piano, so I brought my mobile setup specifically to record it: a Focusrite Scarlett 6i6, a matched pair of Lauten Audio small-diaphragm condensers, and Ableton Live running on an M2 MacBook Air.

I placed the microphones inside the piano's open chassis, aimed toward the soundboard. I recorded every key in two continuous takes: a sustained pass from low to high, then a staccato pass from high to low. The long passes held a little of the room along with the piano.

Many of the notes were out of tune. In the room, their unevenness gave the piano a restless shimmer. Across a keyboard of samples, that same skew could pull a melody off center. I wanted to keep the quality that drew me to the instrument while giving its notes enough common ground to work in a scale.

A gentle correction

Turning the long recordings into individual notes meant finding each attack and working out where its pitch sat. Librosa handled onset and pitch analysis; NumPy helped cut and compare the waveform. When a pitch estimate was reliable and close enough to the intended key, pyrubberband shifted the note only partway toward it. That restraint mattered: I wanted the notes to settle into a scale without making this sound like a different, perfectly tuned piano.

SoundFile read and wrote the WAVs, pyloudnorm brought their levels closer together, and a SciPy filter softened some excess high end. The cleanup made the notes easier to use together, while leaving the piano's grain and slight instability intact.

From the room into Sonic Fauna

Those cleaned samples became Bayerova Piano: a playable instrument, not a restoration of the Airbnb piano. Its six voices let notes overlap and gather into chords. Velocity changes both their volume and color: a light touch stays soft and shaded, while a harder one brings out more attack. Dedicated attack and sustain controls shape how the notes arrive and fade.

The filters, modulated delay, and sample-rate reduction let the piano move away from its original shape. It can be a clear harmonic voice, or turn hazy, wobbly, and grainy inside a pattern. That is the kind of transformation I wanted from it: start with a sound you know, then give it room to become something else.

Take the samples into your own work

I plan to make the cleaned-up piano samples free for use in personal music and sound projects under a Creative Commons license. They will not be available for bundling into other software. I want people to be able to play with these recordings in their own work, while keeping the sample library separate from someone else's app.