Toward the end of last year, Stephen Street Gallery in Ridgewood featured what appeared to be a piano in a dim, empty white room. But if you happened to sit down on the bench and press one of the keys, the sound that emerged was not an A, or a C, or a G-sharp, but the hum of planes landing at LaGuardia Airport in East Elmhurst, the clacking of snooker balls at a Bhutanese restaurant in Woodside, the tinkling of waves washing over broken glass on an Astoria beach, or the patter of rain on Houdini’s grave in Glendale. This piano, known as Surround Sounds Piano_QNS, contained eighty-eight field recordings of the sounds of Queens, and they could be played on their own or in countless combinations, creating a symphony of the borough. Each key also triggered the projection of a corresponding image on the wall above.
Surround Sounds Piano is the brainchild of Daniel Giachetti and Arthur Fleischmann, old friends who grew up a few blocks apart and are now the core members of Mortal Hearts, an arts collective that combines sound and visuals to create conceptual and immersive art pieces.
Daniel and Arthur came up with the idea for the piano while brainstorming together in a Queens coffeeshop. They found a used upright Sohmer piano, “the workingman’s Steinway,” also manufactured in Queens, on Facebook Marketplace. In the process of moving it, the original advertisement fell out of the case.
After receiving a grant from the Queens Art Fund, they began collecting sounds in March 2025. As they began to roam the borough with their field recorder, they realized that “the whole city hums at sixty hertz”—the approximate frequency of the average laundromat when the machines are running.
The friends delight in explaining the technical aspects of retrofitting the piano. They had to tape off the strings to keep them from resonating, and stuff space with a scrap of Daniel’s bedsheets.
The three pedals were reengineered to allow the pianist to loop sounds, alternate sounds, or slow the sounds down via a custom software solution involving two Raspberry Pi computers, Max MSP visual programming language, and 3-D-printed parts.
There are two switches for each piano key: one for the note and one for velocity. Their intent was to reproduce the tactile sensation of playing a real piano. Pressing middle C, of course, brings up an image of the piano itself, and some of the keys have “Easter eggs,” or alternate recordings. On the night I visited, a pianist friend dropped by and affirmed that the instrument “feels good to play.”
As they began to experiment with the sounds, they realized that some—like the scratchy punching sound of the Lemon Ice King of Corona scraping up shaved ice—worked particularly well as beats and could be looped like a drum machine behind other sounds, such as the cawing of Rockaway Beach seagulls. The hum and throb of the Kosciuszko Bridge worked well as a rhythm behind the rippling timbre of violas at a luthier’s workshop. Up to eight sounds and images can be played together at once.
Among the eighty-eight sounds they gathered from all corners of the borough are the beeps and clatters of casino machines at Resorts World in Jamaica; the folk instruments of the Greek Easter Festival in Astoria; the revving of a Jet Skier on the East River; the whines of the Queens “saw lady” playing her saw instrument; Trinity Lutheran Church’s handbell ringers; the punchy, squeezy tinkling of the historic organ in the Forest Park Carousel; the roosters and the pigs at the Queens County Farm in Glen Oaks; a man pontificating on the horses at the Aqueduct Racetrack in Ozone Park; the tinny plunk of a recycling machine accepting cans; the cheers of a Mets game in Flushing; and a recording of all the stop announcements on the 7 train.
In the course of their fieldwork, Daniel and Arthur and their team had some memorable encounters. They joined in a twenty-four-hour chant at Dharma House Tibetan Buddhist center in Woodside. At Paradise Aquarium in Ridgewood, a multigenerational shop, the owner told them he hadn’t noticed the constant bubbling hum of his store till they pointed it out—but then told them that when he opens the door each morning he can instinctively tell if something is wrong with the tanks and fish by any change in the sound. Lots of people mistook them for press because of their professional equipment, which granted them easy access to some off-limits areas, and politicians were eager to interact with them and get sound bites in. They found that throughout the borough, people were receptive to being recorded: “We experienced the incredible generosity of people”; getting permission to record was “weirdly straightforward,” even if people didn’t always understand the scope of the project.
After the piano’s residence at Stephen Street Gallery, it moved for a few weeks of December to the main branch of the Queens Public Library in Jamaica. When I sat down in front of it, a library worker passing by remarked, “When I first saw it, I wished it was a regular piano, ’cause I wanted to play it. Yeah, but then I realized, you know, it’s all the sounds of Queens.”
The piano, as Daniel and Arthur describe it, is “for the entire community to play. To find connections between both familiar sounds and new and surprising ones. The results are sometimes beautiful, sometimes cacophonous, and sometimes a little messy—like Queens itself.” Their hope is that the piano will “help people realize that the sounds they are making are part of a much larger, diverse, interconnected tapestry.” On the last night at the gallery, a woman and her teenage pianist son walked through the door. Still wearing his school backpack over his coat, he sat down and struck a note, “Oh! Oh!” he exclaimed, playing each note tentatively until he understood how it worked. After his impromptu composition had unspooled into the gallery, flashing images of barbershops and traffic cones and pigeons onto the wall, he stood up and took a bow. Arthur reassured him: “There are no wrong notes.”
More information on the piano and on Mortal Hearts and the piano can be found here. The Queens Memory Project will be archiving the project’s sounds and images.
Sense & the City is a monthly blog exploring the hidden corners of New York City. Each month’s post is devoted to one of the five senses. Receive daily sensory impressions via Instagram @senseandthecity.