Tagging of public pianos

General talk Tagging general discussion
1

Hi guys,

I would like to start a bit of discussion again about mapping public pianos, which you can find frequently at e.g. airports or train stations. I wanted to map a piano but wasn’t satisfied with the lack of closure on it.

The last thread I could find here was from June 2020 ( Mapping public pianos - #7 by Kovoschiz ) which is also linked on the wiki page about the tag.

The tag proposed there is amenity=piano, but Kovposch suggests leisure=piano on the wiki Talk page:

Would leisure=piano fit its purpose more? Since some member of the public is supposed to play it. amenity=piano makes me think of pianos used for performance by selected musicians in malls and other public venues, so it’s not merely a matter of access=*. Comparing leisure=bandstand as an example, there was similar discussion in Proposed_features/Bandstand – Kovposch (talk) 06:32, 20 June 2020 (UTC)
Agreed, leisure seems to fit much better. I can’t find a proposal page, though, anyway. B-unicycling (talk) 18:45, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

There is only 1 instance of leisure compared to 312 amenity. I do agree with the reasoning for using leisure, and perhaps it’s not too early to change this meta. But also I don’t know.

Also in the proposed tagging format it is suggested to use musical_instrument=piano/digital_piano to specify what kind of piano it is, but I’m not sure about this tagging. I would like the ability to tag upright vs grand piano, but I don’t know if musical_instrument is right for that then. I see one instance of musical_instrument=upright_piano and one ground_piano (maybe typo for grand_piano?). So maybe this is a sufficient way to tag them, even though nobody seems to do it yet.

Also maybe someone wants to tag it if they ever see a grand-shaped electric piano, maybe grand_digital_piano? I don’t see a point in this as there’s no functional difference in playing but maybe could be of interest to somebody idk.

Also is there any other instruments which can appear like this which would merit a different top level tag? Something like leisure=public_instrument. I can’t think of any but I just had this idea… Maybe someone knows of a public harpsichord… :slight_smile:

What are your thoughts on this? Also should it/can it be put into a proposal? I’m still new to OSM so these are just my thoughts on this.

2

That might refer to the installations where one can play different notes by stepping on a specific area of the ground painted with piano keys, usually intended for kids to play with.

2 Likes
3

Oh good point, I forgot about that one!

4

Handily, the one example in OSM is easy to find via taginfo and overpass, and based on the level tag appears to be in a bar, which has a website - which has a picture of a grand piano in it!

Edit: Which I have now edited.

4 Likes
5

Thanks for hunting that down!

There’s also playground=musical_instrument to consider.

I swear there was some way to tag the (non-typo :wink:) “ground painos”…

Overall, I do think that leisure is a more appropriate key.

6

I support any consolidation effort and tagging schema extensions for specificity that folks want to pursue. I think this is a very nice and useful feature and, with hundreds of uses, it’s just about the perfect time to work out the details a bit.

7

I’d generally (and here specifically) suggest sticking with actually used and documented usage, as opposed to undocumented one with basically no usages.

While the other tag might’ve been better choice some 12-ish years ago, that water is under the bridge now. People have voted with their usages…

While amenity=piano does not have huge usages which would make the task basically impossible, note that attempt at Renaming an existing tag is (still) quite hard (and quite probably, much harder than most people think, and thus not worth it IMHO).

2 Likes