Portal:Piano

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A 19th-century grand piano

The piano is a musical instrument played using a keyboard. It is widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment and for composing and rehearsal. Although the piano is not portable and often expensive, its versatility and ubiquity have made it one of the world's most familiar musical instruments.

Pressing a key on the piano's keyboard causes a padded (often with felt) hammer to strike steel strings. The hammers rebound, and the strings continue to vibrate at their resonant frequency. These vibrations are transmitted through a bridge to a sounding board that more efficiently couples the acoustic energy to the air. The sound would otherwise be no louder than that directly produced by the strings. When the key is released, a damper stops the string's vibration and the sound. In the Hornbostel-Sachs system of instrument classification, pianos are considered chordophones.

The word piano is a shortened form of pianoforte (PF), the Italian word for the instrument (which in turn derives from the previous terms gravicembalo col piano e forte and fortepiano). The Italian musical terms piano and forte indicate "soft" and "strong" respectively, in this context referring to the variations in sound volume the instrument produces in response to a pianist's touch on the keys: the greater the velocity of a key press, the greater the force of the hammer hitting the strings, and the louder the sound of the note produced. This is in contrast to the predecessor of the piano, the harpsichord, which cannot produce different dynamics depending on how hard the key is pressed.


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PianoChord C.svg Show new selections PianoChord C.svg

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Frédéric Chopin (1 March 1810 – 17 October 1849) was a Polish composer, virtuoso pianist, and music teacher of French-Polish parentage. He was one of the great masters of Romantic music. All of Chopin's works involve the piano. They are technically demanding but emphasize nuance and expressive depth. Chopin invented the musical form known as the instrumental ballade and made major innovations to the piano sonata, mazurka, waltz, nocturne, polonaise, étude, impromptu and prélude.

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File:C. Bechstein Poster, about 1920 edit.jpg
German advertisement poster, around 1920

Bechstein is a German manufacturer of pianos established in 1853 by Carl Bechstein, who set out to manufacture a piano able to withstand the great demands imposed on the instrument by the virtuosi of the time such as Franz Liszt. In 1857, Hans von Bülow (Liszt's son-in-law) gave the first public performance on a Bechstein grand piano. Today, Bechstein is in competition with Steinway & Sons, although the Bechstein sound is very different from Steinway's.

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More audio files…

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Credit: eyeliam on Flickr
A Yamaha C7 grand piano miked for audio recording. The placement of the microphones—especially their distance to the strings—has a major influence on the tonal qualities of the piano in the recording (such as whether it will sound bright or mellow).


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Dave Brubeck

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A Lady Playing the Spinet.jpg


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… that aliquot stringing creates a richer piano sound by adding extra resonance strings in the treble?

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Jazz Classical music Rock and Roll Music

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