Innovations in the piano

The Magnetic Balanced Action system, invented by Evert Snel and Hans Velo in the Netherlands, permits variable touch according to the player's preference.

The idea of the system is to use the force of magnets, whose position is adjustable, to regulate the touch-weight of the keys, rather than fixed weights.

The Wessel, Nickel and Gross company makes custom actions for grand pianos (and uprights) that are also epoxy carbon fiber.

It is claimed that bridge agraffes permit efficient transmission of sound from the strings to the soundboard, resulting in a very well-sustained tone.

The Phoenix Piano of the UK also uses a specially designed bridge agraffe to greatly reduce the force exerted on the soundboard, and allowing it to be made of carbon fiber composite instead of wood.

First of all, there must be sufficient transmission of vibratory energy from the string to the soundboard that our ears are ultimately provided with a sound of satisfactory loudness.

If on the other hand the disturbance excited on the string by the hammer were communicated to the soundboard at too rapid a rate, these vibrations would die down so quickly that we would hear little more than a tuned thud, a louder version of what is produced by hitting a note while a wadded handkerchief is firmly pressed against the vibrating part of the string next to the bridge.

We also want the soundboard impedance to be high enough that its resonances will not play an unacceptably large role in the tuning of individual string modes.

[1] It is a long-standing practice to make piano soundboards of spruce, a wood that is both light and stiff; for discussion see tonewood.

According to the Bösendorfer firm, the impetus for building these instruments came from the celebrated pianist Ferruccio Busoni, who at the time was performing his transcriptions of organ works by J. S. Bach.

This practice is the simplest from the viewpoint of instrument design, but is not necessarily the optimum for the player, who must employ quite different wrist, arm, and body motions when playing at the extreme treble and bass ends of the keyboard.

A spectacular 21st century version was conceived by the architect Rafael Viñoly and realized in collaboration with piano maker Chris Maene of Belgium.

This instrument, a full-length concert grand, not only has a concave 88-key keyboard, but is built in a laterally bulging form, so that the widest part of the case is some distance from the player.

In addition, the strings fan out radially from the keyboard, roughly matching the orientation of their keys; hence the instrument is straight-strung rather than cross-strung, a practice held by Maene to be sonically beneficial.

The idea behind duplex scaling, invented by Theodore Steinway in 1872, is that the non-speaking portion of the string, located between the non-speaking bridge pin and the hitch pin (formerly considered the "waste end" and damped with a strip of cloth), resounds in sympathy with the vibrating portion of the string.

Steinway & Sons' earliest employment of the duplex scale made use of aliquots, individually positionable (hence tunable) contact points, where each note of the duplex scale bears a perfect harmonic, intervallic relationship to its speaking length, i.e., an octave or fifth whether doubled or tripled.

Their feeling was that with an accurately templated bridge and carefully located duplex bar, the same result would be achieved with far less fuss.

They felt that the tuning of these short stretches of free string can be achieved with greater accuracy than can be attained with a duplex bar.

Furthermore, since variations in humidity can cause duplex scales to move in pitch more rapidly than the speaking scale, manual readjustment of the string tension on the non-speaking side of the bridge, and/or a readjustment of the duplex position to better accommodate humidity fluctuation, is feasible with individual aliquots.

[citation needed] More recently, Fazioli has modified Theodore Steinway's original idea by creating a stainless-steel track, fixed to the cast iron plate, on which aliquots slide.

The Modell 370i, built by David Klavins, is a custom 88-key upright piano permanently installed at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

In order to play the instrument, a performer must climb a flight of stairs to an elevated platform and walk around to sit down in front of the piano.

This approach was not the norm for keyboard instruments at earlier stages of history: 19th century pianos often had cases in veneered wood, with elaborated carved music stands and legs, and often gilded highlights.

Going back further, the piano's immediate ancestor, the harpsichord, was often decorated with great exuberance, often in bright colors and in some cases with artwork made by skilled painters.

[21] Creative modern piano companies today occasionally offer models that are designed by artists and are intended to break out of the prevalent plain-black pattern.

Schimmel has also teamed up with artists Otmar Alt and Luigi Colani to produce other pianos of breathtakingly unconventional appearance; see figure at right.

In 1988, the firm created a visually very striking special version of its model D concert grand to commemorate the company's 135th anniversary.