About
Seven years at the piano, and a room that wanted to hear it.
Aditya has been playing piano for about seven years. Long enough to have gone through the part where you practise because someone tells you to, and out the other side into the part where you practise because you want to hear the thing finished.
Common Chord started at a senior center. One afternoon, one keyboard, half an hour of pieces he already knew. The residents asked for songs he'd never played. He learned them for the next month. It turned out that playing for somebody is a completely different skill from playing well, and that it's the one that actually makes people keep playing.
So the whole thing is built around that. Students learn for free. Every student performs. The performances happen at senior centers, memory-care homes, and libraries — places where the audience is glad you came and doesn't care that bar 34 was rough.
Why accessibility is the other half
The first student who couldn't take a normal lesson was blind. The teaching materials assumed sight on every page: this is where middle C is, watch my hand, follow the notes. None of it transferred. The workaround at the time was slow, verbal and exhausting for both people.
A hard-of-hearing student ran into a different wall. She could play the notes; she couldn't tell whether she was on the beat, and neither could a teacher usefully explain it to her by counting out loud.
Both problems are teachable. They're just not teachable with the tools that exist. So we started building the tools: tactile keys and spoken note feedback for blind students, and a visible rhythm display for Deaf and hard-of-hearing students. Both are prototypes. Both are designed with the students who need them, not for a category of person we imagined.
How we work
Small, unglamorous, and consistent. We'd rather run twelve good concerts a year than announce a national program. Everything we build for accessibility gets published openly — designs, files, and the mistakes — because a school two states over shouldn't have to rediscover any of it.
- Founded by
- Aditya, student pianist, ~7 years playing
- Cost to students
- Free. Loaner keyboards available.
- Where we play
- Senior centers, memory care, libraries
- Hardware status
- Prototype — not for sale
Get in touch
Want lessons, want to teach, want us to play at your center, or want to help with the hardware — same inbox, and a real person reads it.