I recorded these gentle piano chords on March 25, 2008 while working on a classically influenced piece of music. While re-listening to this today I had the idea of damaging the recording as much as possible with processing to see what I might end up with. The main reason I decided to do this was because I was dissatisfied with the sound of the original recording and thought, perhaps I could get something interesting by degrading the signal significantly. I tried a few different types of processing but settled with heavy limiting followed by a high shelf into monster distortion, topped off with almost 5 seconds of reverb.
Piano Destruction
Here’s another example of using a mallet to get sounds out of my piano. In this case, instead of striking the main part of the string, I let the mallet bounce on the small piece of string after the bridge. This part of the piano is traditionally not used to create sound and the pitches are quite high and not tuned, similar to the area between the tuning pegs and the nut of a guitar. 
This dissonant phrase of piano was created by using a metal mallet to gently taps the stings on the piano in the upper register. I’ve been experimenting with getting some unique sounds out of my piano by not using the keyboard.