
Physics of the Piano (2012) [pdf] - snake117
https://nanohub.org/resources/18884/download/2013.06.19-Giordano-REU.pdf
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emersonrsantos
Sadly no words in the article about the physics of sympathetic resonance,
which is a great part of the rich sound of acoustic instruments. The 'secret'
of the missing fundamentals is just there.

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pepijndevos
Do you know a good resource about it?

I think it would be a fun experiment to model a piano in software. Though
probably way more complicated than my wildest imaginations.

[edit] Wow... I have a piano and I never noticed this
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNKiFGvigrQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNKiFGvigrQ)

But in a normal scenario most of the strings will be damped, so how does that
work then?

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moogly
>I think it would be a fun experiment to model a piano in software.

[https://www.pianoteq.com/](https://www.pianoteq.com/)

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baddox
Also [http://www.truepianos.com](http://www.truepianos.com), which I was just
playing with yesterday. It's incredibly playable.

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ramanan
A related video on the numbers behind piano music, on why it is mathematically
impossible to perfectly tune a piano :

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hqm0dYKUx4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hqm0dYKUx4)

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ta0o0o0
Interesting video, I just have a few nitpicks.

The problem is not that the piano has too many strings, it's that the notes
are fixed. The same is true for any string instrument with frets, like a
guitar, or wind instruments with fixed holes, like a flute.

The video also refers to the fact that equal temperament allows playing in any
key, but doesn't really explain why that's important or what the tuning has to
do with it. (Short answer, before equal temperament, different compromises
were made in which notes were out of tune with respect to which others, and
the schemes commonly chosen only allowed some of the keys (as in "c major" not
the physical key) to be sufficiently in tune to be usable.)

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analog31
As I understand it, people were aware of the problems of the temperaments, but
a temperament is a technology. Each of the old temperaments came with an
algorithm, that your regular Joe musician could use to keep their own
instrument in tune. This in turn was needed because instruments didn't stay in
tune for very long.

Equal temperament requires an expert, which in turn requires an instrument
with stable tuning -- the modern piano.

Wind instruments actually have no straightforward temperament, but are just as
close as possible, and the musician is expected to bend notes as needed. For
all practical purposes, an orchestra is an un-tempered instrument.

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ta0o0o0
OK. I guess I shouldn't have talked about instruments I don't know well.

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agumonkey
Crawling Wikipedia for Piano ancestors was very interesting.

