You ask. The piano plays.
Name a song, describe a mood, or hum a half-remembered melody. ARIA-88 turns your request into a live performance on a real upright piano — 88 mechanical fingers pressing the same wooden keys a pianist would.
88 keys. 88 mechanical fingers. No pianist required.
Five stages, in order. None of it is a metaphor — every stage is a real piece of hardware with its own failure mode.
ARIA listens for a song, a mood, a style or a melody — asked the way you would ask a person, from across a room.
She works out what was actually asked for, and prepares something the piano can perform.
Notes, dynamics, timing and sustain become a complete arrangement across the full 88-key range.
The control system coordinates every strike to the millisecond. Pulse duration is what sets how hard each hammer lands.
Mechanical fingers move the piano’s own keys, hammers and strings. The instrument stays entirely acoustic.
Every note is made of string, hammer, wood, felt and air, with all the resonance and imperfection that implies. Nothing is sampled, and nothing is played back.
And the way in is just talking. No menus, no keyboard, no musical training. Walk up and ask.
Hammers strike real strings a few feet away. You hear the wood, the felt and the room — not a recording of them.
Robotics, embedded control, power electronics, fabrication, acoustics and machine intelligence, all forced to agree with each other.
Once the instrument exists, others can build performance modes, characters, games and installations on top of it.
These are measured or computed figures from the current design, not estimates. Several are the reason the project has not ordered parts yet.
The solenoid is rated 400 mA and actually draws 750. Thirty at once is 22.5 A — which is what sizes the whole power system.
Holding a 24-note chord at full duty would dump 432 W inside a wooden case. Hold power has to come down to about 130 W.
Notes in a chord must land together or it arpeggiates itself. 4.7 ms of the budget is the coil's own rise time, which no amount of clever scheduling removes.
A coil becomes unsafe at about 40 seconds. Firmware force-releases any note held past ten, no matter what the music says.
The electrical architecture, mechanical design, bill of materials, safety rules and staged build plan are complete and have been stress-tested on paper — 69 automated checks across the hardware, the software and the plan's own internal consistency. Four of them still fail, and they are published rather than hidden.
The next gate is physical: put a handful of solenoids against a real piano action and measure what they actually do. Everything downstream depends on that measurement.
Six 16-channel driver boards, logic-level MOSFETs, protected 24-volt distribution, real-time scheduling on a Teensy 4.1, and a separate computer for speech and musical reasoning. Per-coil flyback protection, current limits, fusing, thermal rules and a physical emergency stop.
The full build manual — schematics, action mechanics, budget, firmware model and every stress-test result — is public.
Every figure below is a real line from the project's bill of materials, priced in August 2026. Funding any one of them moves a specific gate.
Ninety-six actuators — the mechanical fingers. The single largest electronic line, and what M0 must validate first.
A used upright in playable condition. Donating an instrument removes this line entirely and is the most valuable single contribution.
A single-board computer to run speech recognition, musical reasoning and arrangement locally.
The 24-volt supply, fusing, flyback protection and terminations that keep 22 amps safely inside a wooden box.
ARIA-88 has a finished blueprint and a public engineering plan — including the parts of it that do not yet work. What she needs now is a piano, a workbench, and the parts that turn the design into a live performance.