We Spent Three Years Building A Piano That Lets You See Music

To actually see music, we spent 3 years building this magic piano. What you are seeing is entirely real, no AI, no screens. We started because when I began learning piano 3 years ago, something felt missing. For centuries, piano music was only heard, never seen. What if we could add another dimension to it, and actually see music? You've probably seen a video like this, where a light explodes as you play. Just one look, and it hit me. But all those lights were fake, just CGI. If this could happen in real life, how cool would that be? So I started trying, but I had no idea back then that this one try would end up taking 3 years. To make music visible, we went through endless tests and iterations, built 4 completely different visual piano prototypes. And to truly master this glowing instrument, I practiced piano for 3 years myself. There is no AI in this video. Today, let me take you on a journey of light and sound. First, we needed something that can rise on its own and glow in mid-air. Our first thought was smoke. This is a smoke machine. It can shoot out beautiful smoke. If you put a roll of it behind the piano, and make the smoke rise whenever a key is pressed, then light it up with lasers. Wouldn't that look cool? Let's build a prototype to find out. This was our first visual piano. Press a key, smoke rises. There's a laser on top that can light it up. At first glance, it looks pretty cool. But once you actually play it... It's a disaster. The smoke drifts everywhere. You can't tell which light matches which note. It feels like a genie is coming out. And after a while, it looks like someone's barbecuing inside the piano. If only the smoke didn't spread, rising in clean chunks like musical notes, then there was still hope. And in this failure, we actually found how to do that. Which is... Vortex rings. When fluid is pushed out quickly, the speed difference between the center and the edges create a stable rotating structure. A vortex ring. That's exactly the shape we needed. What if we use vortex rings instead of smoke? That made the piano way much cooler. Let's get started. This is our smoke vortex piano. It's made up of multiple vortex emitters. Each unit had a speaker and a shutter. The speaker pushes out a vortex ring, and the shutter closes to prevent extra smoke from leaking. I couldn't wait to test it. It does look better, but there are still many problems. There was too much stray smoke. The rings didn't stand out. And after a while, they even blocked the player. And the biggest issue? Each vortex unit was huge. If we made one for all 88 keys, the whole thing would be 4 meters long. Completely unusable. So we tried shrinking it, but once it got smaller, it stopped working. In air, it's extremely hard to create vortex rings that are both small and stable. Then it hit me. A vortex is just rotating fluid. And besides air, the most common fluid we know is... This is our paint vortex piano. These air cylinders suck in paint and fire vortex rings underwater. At first glance, beautiful. But when you play it... Uh, kind of terrible. The paint dissolves into the water. After a few notes, the whole tank turns into watermelon juice. We actually thought about this from the start. Our idea back then was to use the oil-based paint that doesn't mix with water. But once we switched to oil... No rings at all. Because of surface tension, oil in water prefers to form spheres, not rings. At this point, I realized something. We can't use chaotic materials like smoke or water to represent particles that need to be precisely triggered and disappear. But could something like that actually be made? Wait. Blue droplets, rising cleanly, each one landing like a note. These droplets actually looks pretty good. And using drop had one big advantage. It solves the problem of being too large. Because a very small tube can make a drop small enough to map one-to-one with the piano keys. We built a small test unit. It looked very promising. Then we added more needles and LED strips. And got this effect. Dance droplets firing rapidly like a firework exploding. The first time I saw it, I knew we finally had a workable solution. This setup also reminded me of the liquid cooling on the Red Magic 11 Pro. Where you can actually see the coolant flowing through the back of the phone. It looks great and looks gaming smoother. So it was finally time to use this approach to build a real magic piano. This is our droplet piano. We went all in for this setup. To cover the entire piano, we custom made a massive glass tank. Over 400 kilos. It takes at least 8 people to assemble. So we bought a gantry crane in the studio just to lift it. Leaks were inevitable. So we installed floor drains. To tune the droplet speed, we tested 250 kilos of glycerin over two full weeks. So how did it turn out? The first impression was stunning. Droplets plus lighting felt genuinely magical. But over time, problems appeared. The beauty was mostly near the bottom. Once droplets rose higher, they faded into darkness. We added more lights, trying to light up the droplets above. But it didn't help much. They also started drifting, going up. We tried guiding them with glass tubes. But with the glass tube, the magic was gone. We even matched the liquid's refractive index to the glass. So the tubes became invisible. This is pretty cool. This one is just water. And this one is our special mixture. When I put the glass tube into them, this one just disappears. But once there are more tubes, this method doesn't work well. By this point, the project had dragged on for two years. We'd tried everything we could think of. I honestly didn't know what else to do. We've abandoned projects before. But never one that consumed this much time, energy, and effort from almost everyone in the studio. If this failed, could we even keep doing DIY projects? Then, this happened. Even though the seller assured us the tank was strong enough, we filled it with water for safety testing on Friday. On Saturday, water pressure shattered a one-inch-thick glass. The entire system was destroyed. All the electronics were flooded. We had to smash the tank apart just to remove it. If the universe was telling me to stop, this felt like the sign. This project started in January 2023. Back then, I was mainly a tech reviewer. Most of my early audience came from my tech review videos. Later, I shifted to DIY because I really enjoyed doing it. I always wanted to create things that people have never seen before. True visual spectacles. Over the past two years, we've pulled this off more than once. 20 trash cans emptying themselves in line. The machine line that folds thousands of paper doves. A typewriter that types on its own. But I also learned the cost is huge. Because we are not documenting existing wonders. We are trying to invent them from scratch. Travel creators can film what's already out there. Science creators can explain how nature works. But for us to truly amaze people, we need to start with piles of parts, materials, and failures. In the past, even if a lot of people didn't understand, even if the comments kept asking, why not just stick to tech reviews? As long as that image in my head was still there, I was willing to keep going. But this time, we had really reached our limit. Maybe there is no magic in the real world. Maybe this path was wrong from the start. Maybe this broken glass tank was the final ending of years of DIY effort. After all, we needed a magical particle that could rise on its own, emit light, and be precisely controlled. That sounds impossible. Creating something the world has never seen in every video and giving people that kind of awe you feel in nature. Is that even realistic? It rises on its own, close by itself, and can be triggered and disappear. That kind of fact just isn't possible. Stop doing DIY. You are not cut out for it. Reviews were your thing. Stop wasting your time. Humans can't find nature. You simply can't do it. Wait. If we can't build it, what about nature? This is our Blue Tears Piano. What you see glowing is a type of bioluminescent algae. Around the world, you can see this blue glow in coastal waters. It's caused by a reaction between luciferin and luciferase when the algae are stimulated. We didn't spray algae into water. We filled the entire tank with them, then disturbed them with bubbles so they would glow all the way to the surface. The best part of this idea is that we don't need to build a new setup. We can just add algae to our existing piano. Some people might ask, why not use a transparent display for this effect? Well, I actually thought about it at the beginning and quickly gave up on it. Because if the light is shown on a display, it only exists in two dimensions. Changing the viewing angle just a bit makes it look very fake, and the image looks much darker when viewed from the back. For safety, we switched to double-layer tempered glass. A week of testing, no issues. We added LED strips around the piano to give the scene more depth. After all these iterations, we finally had a piano that felt truly magical in the real world. This was our longest project ever. From January 2023 to December 2025, our studio even moved twice during that time. The project stopped and restarted many times, but we never gave up. So why not just do tech reviews? Why spend so much effort on things that seem useless? Five years ago, the first thing I've ever built was a remote-controlled page turner. It feels trivial now, but the moment you realize something you made actually worked, that feeling is kind of magical. I think I just got addicted. Addicted to the feeling of making something myself. Addicted on turning ideas into reality. Addicted on moments of despair turning into breakthroughs. Addicted on those rare miraculous moments. Only DIY lets me relive that journey again and again. But sometimes, DIY isn't just about inventing something new, it's about finding the miracle that nature is willing to lend you. Was it worth it? For me, the answer is obvious. I never learned piano properly, but to play this piano I imagined, to give this video the best ending it deserves. I wouldn't say every day, but whenever I had time after work, I practiced piano. It's been three years now. Thank you for watching. Projects like this are risky. They require constant rebuilding and starting over. And this time, our partner was a brand that also loves pushing limit, Red Magic. When camera bumps keep getting bigger, they made the back completely flat. When phone cooling hit its limit, they put a fan inside the phone. And on the new Red Magic 11 Pro, they even combined liquid cooling. It's exciting to look at and actually plays great. See you next time.