Compare the Steinway recording with live VM strings + noise. Start with C6–C8: listen to the bright attack and the ringing, shimmering decay. Tap again to restart; every button stops the previous sound.
Whole note: recorded Steinway versus live VM strings + noise. Noise only: an estimate extracted from the recording by suppressing narrow tonal peaks, versus the live VM noise layer. Level match sets playback gain: 0% plays raw levels, 100% brings each note's recording peak to −6 dBFS; all buttons of a note use the same gain. Spectrograms use the same scales: 50–12,000 Hz, 0–6 seconds, −100 to −25 dBFS.
Reference notes: C, E and Ab in octaves 1–7, each at pp/mf/ff. The slider below blends the C3, E3, C6, Ab6, C7 and C8 anchors.
Guest size counts the code, string-loop settings and expanded noise envelopes actually loaded for each audition. The full piano budget is 20,480 uncompressed guest bytes.