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Cover of Henry Cowell: Piano Music, recorded in 1963, with Cowell demonstrating the longitudinal sweeping technique. String piano is a term coined by American composer-theorist Henry Cowell (1897–1965) to collectively describe pianistic extended techniques in which sound is produced by direct manipulation of the strings, instead of or in addition to striking the piano's keys.
The Railsback curve shows how a piano tuned to compensate for inharmonicity deviates from theoretically correct equal-tempered tuning. The Railsback curve, first measured in the 1930s by O.L. Railsback, a US college physics teacher, expresses the difference between inharmonicity-aware stretched piano tuning, and theoretically correct equal-tempered tuning in which the frequencies of successive ...
Aliquot stringing is the use of extra, un-struck strings in a piano for the purpose of enriching the tone. Aliquot systems use an additional (hence fourth) string in each note of the top three piano octaves. This string is positioned slightly above the other three strings so that it is not struck by the hammer.
Centuries of work on the mechanism of the harpsichord in particular had shown instrument builders the most effective ways to construct the case, soundboard, bridge, and mechanical action for a keyboard intended to sound strings. The English word piano is a shortened form of the Italian pianoforte, [3] derived from gravecembalo col piano e forte ...
A man tuning an upright piano. Piano tuning is the process of adjusting the tension of the strings of an acoustic piano so that the musical intervals between strings are in tune. The meaning of the term 'in tune', in the context of piano tuning, is not simply a particular fixed set of pitches. Fine piano tuning requires an assessment of the ...
A prepared piano is a piano that has had its sounds temporarily altered by placing bolts, screws, mutes, rubber erasers, and/or other objects on or between the strings. Its invention is usually traced to John Cage 's dance music for Bacchanale (1940), created for a performance in a Seattle venue that lacked sufficient space for a percussion ...
prepared piano, i.e. introducing foreign objects into the workings of the piano to change the sound quality; string piano, i.e. hitting or plucking the strings directly or any other direct manipulation of the strings; sound icon, i.e. placing a piano on its side and bowing the strings with horsehair and other materials
Cross-stringing (sometimes called overstringing) is a method of arranging piano strings inside the case of a piano so that the strings are placed in a vertically overlapping slanted arrangement, with two heights of bridges on the soundboard instead of just one.