The rebuild: 575 pianos, 250 events, and a promise
WorldPianos is back under Sing for Hope — here's what we restored, how the map works now, and how one tap from you keeps it honest.
WorldPianos began as a community project with a simple conviction: anyone, anywhere, should be able to find a public piano and play it. That community mapped hundreds of pianos, tracked 250 piano events across 198 places, and wrote about street pianos with real love for years. Then the site went quiet.
Sing for Hope — the New York nonprofit that has placed artist-designed pianos in public spaces since 2010 — has now rebuilt WorldPianos from the ground up, and this post is our promise about how it works.
What came back
Everything the original community made survives here. The blog is restored, including the admin's logs that chronicled piano donations from Oregon to Australia. The events archive — 250 festivals, installations, and year-round programs going back to 2008 — is browsable again. And the piano database holds 575 mapped instruments from OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia, Wikidata, city open-data portals, and the community itself.
Why the map shows fewer pianos than the database holds
Here is the deal we've made with you: the map only shows pianos we believe are really there. Street pianos move, weather, and disappear — a directory that never admits this becomes a museum of ghosts. So every piano carries a freshness label, and unverified ones stay off the public map until someone confirms them. We'd rather show you a smaller number you can trust than a big number that wastes your afternoon.
How you keep it honest
Every piano page has a one-tap check-in: Played it? Still there? Gone? That single tap is the heartbeat of this whole project — it winds the freshness clock, warns the next traveler, and tells our team where to look. If you play a public piano this week, tap it. If you know a piano we don't, add it — no account needed.
The pianos are out there. Go play one, and tell us about it.