Piano

A keyboard instrument in which felt-covered hammers strike strings. Its action lets players vary loudness by changing how quickly and forcefully they press the keys.

Piano action: The mechanism that transfers a piano key press to a hammer and controls the hammer’s return. It translates key movement into the hammer speed that shapes each note’s loudness.
Keyboard instrument: A musical instrument played by pressing a row or array of keys. The piano belongs to this broad family but produces sound with hammers and strings.
Bartolomeo Cristofori: An Italian instrument maker credited with inventing the piano around the turn of the eighteenth century. His hammer-action instrument made graduated loudness possible from a keyboard.
Piano performance: The practice of interpreting and playing music on the piano. Performance draws on the instrument’s broad range, touch sensitivity, and sustain.
Pipe organ: A keyboard instrument that produces sound by directing air through pipes. It shares the piano’s keyboard layout but sustains tones without hammer-struck strings.
Piano hammer: A compact, felt-covered component that strikes a piano string and then rebounds. Its impact excites the string, while its rebound lets the string vibrate freely.
Musical keyboard: An arrangement of keys used to select musical pitches or trigger sounds. Its ordered keys give pianists a visible map of pitch and musical intervals.
Clavichord: A quiet keyboard instrument in which metal tangents touch strings directly to produce sound. Its direct string contact allowed expressive control but far less volume than the piano.
Piano sonata: A multi-movement composition for solo piano, especially prominent in classical music. The piano’s range and independence of its hands support large-scale solo works.
Digital piano: An electronic keyboard instrument designed to reproduce the sound and playing response of an acoustic piano. It models piano sounds electronically instead of producing them with vibrating strings.

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