First

Light

Pianos

🡪 this project could change history

Innovate UK Creative Catalyst award winner 2025

The First Light Pianos project integrates extraordinary structural engineering and lightweight composites to serve music-makers everywhere.

600,000 pianos sold every year are all traditional grands or uprights, heavy, outdated. The only technological evolution (digital keyboards) has stripped the strings, removing the acoustic, resonant experience.

We asked the fundamental question. Could modern engineering make a lightweight, space-saving grand piano possible?

First Light Pianos is:

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Developing a lightweight, vertical grand piano, fit for the 21st Century

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Ensuring all the resonance and rich experience expected from a grand piano

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Working with world-leading structural and composites engineers

Through our Industrial Research partners we access world-leading structural engineering, state-of-the-art facilities and expertise in lightweight composites manufacturing

Atelier One are internationally-renowned, award-winning structural engineers, the creative brains behind iconic structures like World Building of the Year, Singapore’s ‘Gardens by the Bay’ and Anish Kapoor’s ‘Cloud Gate’ in Chicago.

Atlas Composite Technologies are a well established UK composites manufacturer with an unrivalled reputation for manufacturing complex composite components for aerospace, motorsport, satellite communications and space flight.

Sarah Nicolls, Project Lead and Product Concept Lead

Dr Sarah Nicolls was an award holder on Innovate UK’s flagship programme for female founders, Women in Innovation last year and belongs to only 7% of female named patent contributors.

Sarah is a world-class concert pianist specialising in new music, premiering hundreds of works including piano concertos.

Sarah brings together an expert user perspective and her ambitious focus to marry modern engineering into the instrument she’s played since she was 3.