For a long time I had a fascination with classical music, it was my favourite genre and I practically listened only to classical music. I would listen excessively to pieces such as Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 as well as his Ballades and Nocturnes, Brahm’s Piano Concerto No.1, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No.2, and many more. I would enjoy listening to different version of pieces by the great modern Pianists such as Richter, Horowitz, Lang Lang, Zimmerman etc. Nowadays, I still enjoy classical music, but not as exclusively as I did. My passion for classical music and the great composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, Bach and Chopin, inspired me to try and learn to play the piano. My dream was to be able to play a Chopin piece. So I took weekly lessons for a few months, and since a piano is quite a large instrument, I didn’t have one, and most of my practising was during the lessons and in a hotel building, which had a conference room with a piano in it that was mostly not used. Unfortunately, not being able to practice daily eventually made me stop the lessons. My only memory from that time is this recording of me playing during a practice session in which I practice pieces by Chopin, Bach and Mozart.

Music is a very pure manifestation of nature and the laws of physics. The way sound is generated, using any instrument, boils down to creating waves of high and low air pressure with a given frequency which originate at the instrument and reach our ears.

I particularly like the piano for its overall beauty of design, the way the sound is generated in an acoustic piano, the black and white keys triggering a hammer, which hits a string with a given length, which in turn determines the key’s sound. Additionally, the piano demonstrates the elegance of the human hand and fingers, their flexibility, dexterity and fluency. Why is it that certain sound are almost universally pleasant whereas others feel dissonant, and why is it that certain combination of notes feel harmonious, and evoke universal emotions of happiness or sadness is an interesting question, which may have evolutionary roots.

I’ve recently purchased a Kawai es110 electric piano, which has 88 weighted keys and sounds individually sampled from an acoustic grand piano, making it the closest I could get to a real acoustic piano at a reasonable price and size. So I’m back pursuing my side dream of learning the piano, for now I’m using an app, which didn’t exist at the time called FlowKey, which allows to practice the piano and getting feedback while playing, which is quite cool.