Our Seattle office sits in the heart of the city’s nightlife and music center in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Each July, the Capitol Hill Block Party transforms the area into a two-day long festival celebrating independent music.

In May before the festival, our creative team wanted to find a way to amplify the creative, independent, thinker/maker/hacker spirit of the festival and the neighborhood out into the world. All around us, Seattleites were creating lo-fi art, artisinal hardware and craft technology.

After brainstorming extensively, the team’s big idea was to explore how an instrument could be brought to life and behave as a human. What if that instrument could interact and even take its own song requests? Based on that idea, we decided the player piano would be a great instrument to re-build. It was a forgotten technology with a massive appeal. Stanley Piano was born.