Hi. I'm Max Mellman (he/him), and beloved melody (of my parents Belove and Mellman) is my software design studio.

I'm a veteran elementary music teacher, musician, arranger, and UI designer from New Jersey. I'm also the author of The Bagel Song and the creator of the app I Love a Piano.

I've been dreaming about a proper "portrait piano" app since finding Dr. Jorg Garbers' MIDI Keyboard in 2018. In 2023, I enrolled in a UI design course, and in late 2024, started making the piano as an AI-assisted programming experiment. For fun, I'd show it to fellow musicians, non-musician friends, and my students, and each time, they'd offer real feedback: "Needs more instrument sounds" or "Why can't it show a full octave?" or "Does it work in landscape?" This continued feedback, combined with my own stubbornness and wandering imagination, gave the experiment momentum, and shaped its continued development through 2025.

Now it's a real app — dry and ready to play — starting at $4 on the App Store.

I Love a Piano is guided by the principles that the best technologies are tools made for people, and that access to a piano can change someone's life. Play with it. Mess with it. Make music with it! I'm excited to see what will happen once it's in people's hands.

Please enjoy I Love a Piano.

~ Max