Orphea
Orphea is a 13-key electronic piano roughly the size of a large phone, from Pianni, created by Jordan Daniels. It is the first digital-piano in a spoke otherwise made of synthesizers, samplers and controllers.
It does not exist as a product yet. Checked 2026-09-01: the Kickstarter page is a pre-launch "Launching soon" listing — 39 followers, creator marked "First created · 0 backed", filed under Hardware, located San Francisco, CA — with no price, no funding goal, no dates and no spec sheet. Pianni's own store lists it as "ORPHEA Mini Piano (Coming soon!)". Per Piano & Synth Magazine (3 Aug 2026), Daniels says "the product design and working prototype are ready, with the next step being the production process, including tooling, manufacturing, assembly and then first full production run."
What the maker claims
Via orphea-designboom:
- 13 physical black-and-white keys, one chromatic octave C→C, plus octave buttons that move the range without enlarging the instrument
- Polyphonic: designboom reports "complex Bach fugues" played on it
- Built-in speakers, headphone output, MIDI, USB-C charging
- Moulded plastic enclosure; "only slightly larger than a modern smartphone"
- Keys are "near full size width … but about half the height of many pianos and music keyboards" (Piano & Synth Magazine)
What nobody has published
No sound engine of any kind. Sampled piano, modelled, or synthesized is simply not stated anywhere,
including on the maker's own site. Corrected 2026-09-14: orphea-musicradar (MusicRadar,
2026-09-02) names it — a "built-in multi-wave synth engine", so synthesized — and adds that the keys
are not velocity sensitive and the range shifts three octaves. Still unpublished: a voice count,
battery figure, dimension, weight, MIDI transport (DIN / USB / Bluetooth), or price. Corrected
2026-09-22: Pianni's own product page (pianni.co/pages/orphea) now lists a 1,200 mAh battery
rated for up to 8 hours, 130 g, 170 × 78 × 28 mm, MIDI In/Out, USB-C charging, a 3.5 mm
headphone jack, and waveforms named Sine / Rounded / Custom. It also says velocity-sensitive keys are
"being developed for the production version", so the MusicRadar point describes the prototype. Still
unpublished: a voice count (the page says only that it "can play multiple notes at once"), the
physical MIDI connector (corrected 2026-10-06: the same page now says "USB-C for recharge
and MIDI", with MIDI In/Out in its spec table, and names no DIN or Bluetooth), and a price (the page
still says only that a Kickstarter is coming). This is the second pocket instrument the spoke has paged with no engine
description at all, after md-7-pocket-synthesizer — and there the omission was in a store listing
taking pre-orders.
Three pitches for one object
The three accounts in hand describe different products:
| Where | Who it is for |
|---|---|
| [[orphea-designboom | designboom]] |
| Kickstarter | "A Pocket-Sized Piano for Creativity Anywhere", category Hardware |
| pianni.co (the maker) | the "Signature Instrument" of "a modern music learning ecosystem designed to introduce children to sound, rhythm, and creativity", sold beside beginner piano books, "screen-free and child-safe" |
Only the maker's own site names the buyer, and it names children learning to play. Neither press account mentions children at all. Both readings fit the same object, since one octave plus octave buttons is either a sketchpad constraint or a beginner's first keyboard, but they imply different prices and different competitors. Recorded as a conflict in synthesis; the Kickstarter copy, when it launches, will settle it.
Where it sits
The spoke's thesis 3 says the interesting portable instruments are the ones you don't play by keys — chord buttons (chord-synthesizer, minichord, hichord), an encoder wall (oxi-e16), a tracker grid. Orphea is the clean inversion: it keeps the piano keyboard and shrinks everything else, and its whole design argument is about how much of a keyboard survives the shrink. Set against m-vave-fm-1, which has 27 keys but is an FM synth where the keys are input to a sound design instrument, Orphea's keys are the point rather than the interface.
It also lands in the spoke's pocket-hardware corner (minichord, md-7-pocket-synthesizer, m-vave-fm-1) as the only member that is not a synthesizer, and, if the Pianni framing wins, the only instrument here aimed at people who cannot yet play.
Related
pianni · jordan-daniels · orphea-designboom · orphea-musicradar · digital-piano · md-7-pocket-synthesizer · minichord · m-vave-fm-1 · chord-synthesizer · midi-controller