Piano Module

On paper, Piano looks like the friendliest of the Medium modules: find a cell in the manual, play a few keys. In practice it’s a chain of four translations. Fingers turn dots into an octave, eyes turn a lamp into a color, the manual turns that pair into note names, and somebody has to turn note names into “fifth key from the left” before the player at the keyboard can do anything at all. Every one of those handoffs is a place to slip. Your team first meets Piano on Level 9.

What the Manual Actually Asks

Think of the Piano page as a lookup grid. Lamp colors run along one edge, octave numbers along the other. Your two clues meet in a single cell, and that cell holds a handful of note letters – four, according to the community walkthroughs that have documented it. Those letters are the melody. Nothing else on the panel matters for the answer.

The twist is that nobody at the bomb can use a letter directly. The Blind Monkey feels shapes, not labels, so “play an E” is meaningless to them. The letters have to become positions first.

Letters Into Positions

The convention fan guides settled on is simple: count the white keys from the far left, starting at C. So C is the first key, D the second, and the sequence carries on through E, F and G to A as the sixth key and B as the seventh. Write it on a sticky note if your Mute Monkey is new to the role.

• Left half: C = 1, D = 2, E = 3
• Middle: F = 4, G = 5
• Right end: A = 6, B = 7

Splitting the Work

Putting the conversion with the Mute Monkey is the cleanest setup. They already have the letters in front of them, finger counts map naturally onto positions one to seven, and the Deaf Monkey is left with a purely numeric relay.

A Clean Run, Start to Finish

1. Dots first. The Blind Monkey traces the octave cell in their usual orientation and announces it: “Octave three.”
2. Echo. The Deaf Monkey says it straight back. One number, heard by everyone, before anything else happens.
3. Lamp second. The Deaf Monkey names the lit color as its own sentence, never tacked onto the octave.
4. Lookup. The Mute Monkey finds the row and the column and reads the letters in the cell.
5. Convert. Every letter becomes a number from one to seven before it leaves the Mute Monkey’s hands.
6. Send two or three at a time. Finger counts go to the Deaf Monkey, who forwards them in small groups.
7. Echo, then play. The Blind Monkey repeats each group and only plays it after a “yes”.

What It Sounds Like

Where Runs Fall Apart

• Fingers on keys too early. The Blind Monkey starts the melody while the Deaf Monkey is still speaking. Hands stay off until the group is complete and confirmed.
• “Three” with no noun. Is that the octave or the third key? Attach the word every time.
• A flipped dot cell. Reading the octave from a different angle silently swaps the row – and the whole melody with it.
• Letters reaching the keyboard. If the Deaf Monkey ever says a note name to the Blind Monkey, the conversion step was skipped.
• Marathon callouts. A full melody in one breath feels fast and ends in a replay. Small groups win.
• Guessing after an interruption. Pressure on Level 9 and the Alarm on Level 10 can hit mid-tune. Ask out loud which key comes next instead of trusting memory.

Bombs That Feature It

Level 10 is where Piano gets serious. Symbol shares the bomb, both modules work in steps, and the Alarm can go off in the middle of either one. Whoever owns the melody should say the next position out loud after every played group, so the count survives a ten-second scramble.

Before You Load the Bomb

• The Blind Monkey always feels the octave cell from the same side.
• Octave and lamp are two separate sentences.
• Everyone counts keys from the left, with C as one.
• One named player converts letters to numbers.
• Numbers travel in groups of two or three, each echoed back.
• After any interruption the team confirms the next key before touching anything.

Quick Answers