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Pripyat - Pianos from the Chernobyl radioactive exclusion zone.

"For seven years our team has made more than 25 trips to the city of Pripyat for detailed collection of audio materials. We’ve found and recorded 20 instruments in various parts of Pripyat that are of different levels of preservation and functionality. This amount of instruments was necessary to create a tool suitable not only for sound design, but also for writing compositions. Our goal was to create a virtual instrument which will show the nature of the degradation of instruments under the effects of harsh weather conditions and radiation, yet which also would have the most pure sound. All the pianos we could find participated in the creation of the final sound."

This is now available at an introductory price of $149 ($199 list).

Developers' rationale for delay is the most reasonable we have seen here in some time:



https://strixinstruments.com/pripyat-pianos/

Wow. What a conversation piece this would be! Uhhh.... I'm tempted!

Agreed TS.

I nearly feel off my chair when I bumped into this VI. This is a great conversation piece and a project well worth supporting.

The webpage is being populated with demos and the current ones sound great (despite the pianos suffering decades of harsh radiation and weather).

I just saw the HBO series.
The product doesn't attract me, but it's a cool idea.

I don't see what would attract someone to visit the world's worst radiation zone for **any** reason.
But just to record a decades-old beater piano? That's madness.

I assume this is a VST product, right?
Well, I'm known here for spending far too much money on VST virtual instruments.
But would I spend a note and a half on a VI that sounds like an out-of-tune saloon piano?
Nope. Would you?

Side note: If this were presented on You Tube, how many people would comment that this product might be radioactive?

Is it radioactive when you play it through speakers? Do you have to use a lead PC case? Or a graphite one? Or a boron one with graphite tips? Has somebody measured the latency? I guess 3.6 Röntgen/h would be enough, taking in mind the dosimeter can’t measure outside that.

It seems you watched the show too! I asked my wife and she said this is exactly how it would happen too. She said the show felt pretty authentic, aside from the British accents everyone was sporting.

"Out-of-tune" and "saloon piano" - that's almost a pleonasm!


On a day when I will be spending a pretty penny on an professional audio engineer to come over and undo the mess that I did, I should just stop looking at this thread because each time I look, I feel an urge to get my card out.

It's not that it's a honky tonk piano. It's that it's the sound of a honky tonk piano that has suffered hard radiation for 33 years! That makes it a unique honky tonk piano!

Frankly, I’m pi**ed off with that sudden Chernobyl mania. The show was great but people are unnecessarily hyping it to a degree I was already nitpicking it even before I started watching it As a result I’m rather disappointed. And there are some pretty rubbish moments too. It’s total BS that bunch of miners would ruin the minister’s suit, etc, etc. There’s too much Hollywood nonsense but other than that it was a great show that made me read thoroughly about that disaster, how and why it happened, etc.

It's media mania. Chernobyl was long forgotten until it was resurrected by the media.
The fix? Turn off the media and you'll be free from the mania.
Simple. Did that nearly a quarter century ago.

Haha. I guess you'd be annoyed to find this isn't the first discussion of this show on PW!


Ага.


Yeah, at the time of the accident, my father was a nuclear reactor engineer and a regulator with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He would tell us kids about the accident as it was happening. So it is probably not a surprise that the things I thought I knew about the accident are not at all like the things that actually happened! (at least according to the mini-series) Those Soviets!

After watching the miniseries, my wife is researching the Russian Internet on Chernobyl and has learned a lot about it. I also have a brother-in-law (wife's sister's husband) who has a brother-in-law who was a soldier sent to Chernobyl as liquidator. He's still alive because he wasn't a very obedient soldier!

BTW, I have a master degree in engineering physics and took the nuclear physics exam with the top score but since I switched to software engineering I have virtually forgotten everything! I struggled understanding the Wikipedia explanation about what exactly happened at Chernobyl and I couldn’t find any other cleaner explanation. It’s to my great surprise that the explanation given by Legasov in the final episode, the one with the red and blue blocks was shockingly clear and understandable! Kudos to the show consultants for coming up with that “explanation for dummies”. I am yet to see a better explanation on the Internet.

Yeah, my father, who now is retired, now knows (or think he knows) everything there is to know about Chernobyl. I told him he might still have a thing or two to learn about it and told him to watch the miniseries! LOL.

Yes, the red and blue block thing is almost as good as this "proof" of the Pythagorean theorem I found for my daughter.

Chernobyl was probably the biggest single event in my lifetime. I remember being out in the Chernobyl rain when it made its way over to my half of the continent. I haven't started to glow yet...

It's a fantastic idea.

Tyrone, I'd love to meet your father. I've always been fascinated by all matters nuclear.

Why do virtual piano makers have to add in extra instruments in their demos? Makes me think they don't believe their products are good enough to stand (sound) on their own.

Besides, it makes it harder for the potential buyer to figure out how they sound, on their own, again, which is how piano VSTs must be judged.

I can imagine that professional pianists (or arrangers) might want to hear how that particular piano sound fits in with an ensemble. I can imagine some pianos fit in better than others due to tone, etc.

I am a downwinder from the Nevada nuclear test site. 66 years old.
I was Exposed to radiation and bio chemical weapons my first 5 years of my life.
You do not want to see.the list of my auto immune diseases.
ALL governments take zero responsibility for what they have done to their citizens.
We really know nothing of what radiation and exposure to toxic chemicals will do to us both short and long term.
Lesson learned make ALL governments accountable to their citizens.

That’s too bad I never knew there was a nuclear test site in Nevada. I need to read about that. Is it still a functioning facility or it was a Cold War thing? We’re dreaming about a road trip to the US with my wife (and I’ve actually never been to the US), so I know what to avoid already

Here you go! Also this could be a useful reference.