The Mechanical Pianist places two porcelain-and-chrome robotic hands in front of a piano, then lets them perform Satie, Chopin, Joplin, or any MIDI file you bring. Fingers settle onto individual keys, cyan joints flare with each strike, and a virtual director cuts between warm close-ups, overhead views, and shots inside the exposed piano action. This is not the usual cascade of glowing piano-roll bars. You watch the physical performance itself, complete with moving keys, hammers, dampers, strings, pedals, and the occasional impossible stretch the robot admits it cannot reach.

Chris Simpkins built the open-source TypeScript project as three connected systems: musical interpretation, physical performance, and cinematic presentation. Beam searches assign every note to a hand and finger before playback; motion planning and inverse kinematics convert that fingering into wrist paths, joint poses, and key contact; Three.js renders the result through WebGL with volumetric light, depth of field, motion blur, reflections, and a music-aware camera director.

You can import a MIDI file, play the robot live from a computer or Web MIDI keyboard, inspect the source, or render the performance to MP4 in the browser using WebCodecs. It is part music visualizer, part robotics simulation, and part concert cinematographer.