The Piano Research Paper

The piano, also called the pianoforte,was created by harpsichord maker Bartolomeo Christofori in 1709. There are a few instruments created before the piano with similarities. The first similar instrument was the zither. It was made in Africa and Southeast Asia. The zither was a stringed instrument that was found around 3,000 B.C. during the Bronze Age. The zither line included: the ground zither, the bar zither, and the board zither. These instruments were all plucked. It was used by Pythagoras, who used it to try to prove that all laws of music are based on ratios. The zither only had one string. More strings were added and the monochord became the polychord. (Crombie 4-5).
The hurdy-gurdy was the earliest stringed instrument with a keyboard. It was created in the tenth century and imitate the look of a zither. The hurdy-gurdy is originally from the violin family, although having a keyboard. The hurdy-gurdy’s keyboard also didn’t have any flats or sharps. Sharps and flats weren’t added to keyboards until the thirteenth century. The plantan was the next prelude to the piano. …show more content…
The sound mechanism contained a soundboard, frame, and string setup that was similar to the zither, monochord, and the clavichord. One very important piece of the piano that pretty much made it a piano was the escapement mechanism. Created by Cristofori, it allowed the string to vibrate by making a hammer hit a string and come right back down. Since strings were becoming thicker so they wouldn’t break, tension was becoming higher to create the right pitch. In order for the piano to not break, an iron frame was made. It was put in many square pianos because this kind of piano was affected the most by higher string tension. This stopped the warping of the piano, but made it heavy and unwieldy. This made the square piano very unpopular and led to its downfall in the piano market (Crombie 5, 14,