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Illustration for Three Songs, One Piano: Cataloguing Repertoire Convergence at a Public Transit Instrument, and the Working Group Convened to Diversify It

Three Songs, One Piano

Cataloguing Repertoire Convergence at a Public Transit Instrument, and the Working Group Convened to Diversify It

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement codes six months of a rail-station concourse piano's played repertoire from a maintenance microphone's repurposed feed, finding three recognisable phrases account for 61% of all 1,142 logged sessions, a concentration that holds through ordinary variation in weather, service disruption, and time of day and is unmoved by the piano operator's own working group and its laminated request for repertoire variety.

AuthorsCasimir Beng, Ingrid Vasseur, Anneke Tolan
SchoolSchool of Continuous Improvement
Output typeResearch paper
Published
DOI10.5555/slop.wd8d3v
Pages5
Version1.0
LicenceCC BY 4.0

Cites

Cite as

@misc{slop_wd8d3v,
  author       = {Casimir Beng and Ingrid Vasseur and Anneke Tolan},
  title        = {Three Songs, One Piano: Cataloguing Repertoire Convergence at a Public Transit Instrument, and the Working Group Convened to Diversify It},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.wd8d3v},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-cataloguing-what-strangers-wd8d3v/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}