What modern innovations have been/are being made for the piano?
The piano underwent major changes between its invention ca. 1700 through the late 1800s: the double escapement, the iron frame, cross-stringing, among others. But the piano reached a mature state by the late 1800s and is largely unchanged since ... as far as I know.
What modern innovations/experiments are out there?
This question concerns the acoustic/mechanical piano. Although electronic keyboards represent an evolution, for the purposes of this question, they're a different instrument – in the way the piano is a different instrument than a harpsichord.
Answer directory
Extended pitch range: added lower pitches
Lump-String Construction: string construction technique to reduce inharmonicity.
Quarter-tone piano: Constructed in the 1920s for composing quarter-tone music.
Harmonic pedal: raises dampers, releasing the damper of played key.
Tack piano: Piano amplified by inserting thumbtacks into the hammers.
Fazioli pianos: Piano manufacturer credited with several innovations.
Una Corda piano: Build by David Klavins, features one string per key.
Maquiano: Allows for temporary retuning of a limited range of pitches.
Speaking piano: Piano modified with player mechanism resulting in imitated speech.
Infinite sustain: Electromagnetic modification eliminating sound decay.
Vertical (Tall) Piano: Another David Klavins creation; no wound strings.
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www.klavins-pianos.com/products/una-corda/ The unique features of the Klavins Una Corda Piano include
One string per note, open body design (no cabinet), double-layer soundboard of selected, solid mountain spruce, rib-less
tone modulator (various material strips), stainless steel frame.
If you have not heard this piano, try to find some high quality recordings of it
The Fluid Piano has potential...but I've yet to hear anyone do anything interesting with it.
And here is everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask about the Fluid Piano. www.thefluidpiano.com/ Once again, it appears no one has very well figured out what to do with it. As a jazz player I could see the potential, but the only album yet released is one of Indian ragas, which makes good sense, but is more like adding the piano to the general suite of accepted classical Indian instruments, rather than using this invention to...using the invention to...uhhh...???
There is one almost forgotten chapter in the music history: Quarter-tone music: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter_tone There has been pianos constructed to play this kind of music - I have seen one on display in Prague. It has three keyboards, one of them shifted (by a quarter-tone) and inside two full scale piano frames with strings. Quite a monster, though.
There were some composers composing this kind of music (czech Alois Haba, for example) and one can find even recordings of this kind of instruments.
There is a picture on czech wiki: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%C4%8Ctvrtt%C3%B3nov%C3%BD_klav%C3%ADr_3.jpg
VitVit, CC BY-SA 4.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The August Forster website contains additional information. The first of his/their quarter-tone pianos was a grand built in 1923 for Alois Haba. It contained two actions tuned a quarter-tone apart. In 1928 another version of the instrument was built for Ivan Wyschnegradsky.
Here is an image from the patent (SOURCE).
The Player Piano was invented in the late 1800s, allowing an early form of playback before the invention and popularization of recording.
There is a modern version, the Disklavier, which accept MIDI. Here's the experimental musician Hainbach playing Black MIDI on a Disklavier. this technology opens possibilities by allowing music beyond the capability of any human pianist.
Horatz already brought up quarter-tone pianos. I want to mention that Kari Ikonen has been working on a device he calls maqiano that allows a musician to temporarily adjust the tuning of a limited range of keys on a piano.
I'm not sure whether he has gone commercial, yet (patents pending). His motivation is chiefly to be able to play the maqam scales without having to retune a grand piano. See here for an example, and here for a demo (both in youtube). The term is a portmanteau of maqam and piano :-)
Electric piano
Although I suspect this isn't the answer you're after, it's probably the biggest and most significant innovation. It allows the "same" instrument to be played, but more portable, cheaper, with a greater variety of sounds, and sometimes with the ability to do extra things like bend notes.
The not convincingly piano-like sound of early varieties (e.g. Fender Rhodes) are now also widely copied so their inadequacies have stuck and been sought after in their own right.
Piano Roll
Wikipedia tells me that this emerged sometime in the late 19th century, and allowed pianos to play themselves. It's obviously significant as an early "recording" format.
To add a bit more detail: a roll of paper with holes in is scrolled through a reader mechanism. Each column on the paper corresponds to a single note and so when a hole is in the "read" position the note is played. The original mechanisms appear to use a pneumatic mechanism - air is continuously blown into the sheet and when it is able to pass through a hole it triggers a valve. The pneumatic action physically depresses the keys and uses the normal hammer mechanism and thus it genuinely is a piano.
I think rolls could be produced in two ways: first by "writing them out" almost like sheet music. Second using a modified piano mechanism to punch holes as you play thus recording a performance.
Transposing piano
Where the keyboard shifts along to hit different strings and allow you to change key without understanding music. I can't find much about the date of invention, and they were never widely adopted (at least outside of the purely electronic versions that almost every electric piano can do).
I don't know a whole lot about the transposing piano except that Irving Berlin famously used one and mainly worked on the pentatonic that comes from all the black keys (which could be transposed to any key with the aid of the transposing piano). Here's a short television clip of him discussing it..
I can also find a shaky and unwatchable youtube video showing an 1896 transposing piano in action. The video shows how the keyboard (and it looks like the hammer mechanism too) slides relative to the string.
Extended Range Pianos
Guitarists aren't the only ones interested in downtuning! The Imperial Bösendorfer, built in 1909, extends the range of your standard 88 key piano down to a low C0, 9 semitones lower than the standard low A0.
Image Source
Lump String Construction
Proposed by Franklin Miller Jr. in a 1949 paper and patented by Albert Sanderson, a lump constructed string reduces the inharmonicity of the piano's wires by adding a small extra mass of winding near the ends of the speaking length. I've seen these in person but clearly they're uncommon as I cannot find an image! Here's a lumped string on an electric bass guitar:
Image Source
In one word, I would say: Fazioli
For a very long time now, Steinway & Sons have dominated not only the market of top range pianos, but also they have become almost synonymous of what a piano is supposed to be and to sound like.
In the last 10-20 years, however, Fazioli pianos have emerged as a real contender for that position, and although they are a tiny company compared to Steinway, and likely to remain small, I think that the innovation and quality that they have been demonstrating is very real.
Some of their innovations, such as double and customizable action, are mentioned here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovations_in_the_piano If you google "Fazioli pianos" you'll easily find articles and videos where they explain how those pianos are made, their history, and sound comparisons with other top makers.
Here are a few links to get started:
Improving the repeating action on upright pianos (to achieve the same capability as on a grand piano): medium.com/@thesteminists.uh/improving-the-upright-piano-action-an-engineering-project-part-3-33d593d03d93 Also practice pedals which put a damper across a large part of the strings to almost completely muffle the sound.
The harmonic pedal
This is a fourth pedal invented by Denis de La Rochefordière, around 1985[1][2], which can cover the capabilities of the sustain and sustenuto pedal, with an additional sympathetic resonance effect.
Basically, it has two positions:
when pressed all the way down, it acts like the sustain pedal
when pressed halfway, it lifts all dampers, but as soon as a key is pressed+released, that damper falls back, offering the sympathetic resonance of the other undampened strings, without sustaining the played note.
Here is a video presentation:
[2] www.harmonicpianopedal.com/comment_en.php [1] www.feurich.com/en/innovation/pedale-harmonique/
Nickelodeon
The band Sailor is known for their self-invented "Nickelodeon". In this video it can be seen in action.
Finally a few words about the £ 7000 dream-machine which bears a
passing resemblance to duplicate honky-tonk pianos removed from any
Dodge City saloon during Gold Rush era and placed back to back on
stage. The instrument is basically Georg's brain-child and is in fact
the casing of two upright pianos moulded together to look like an
old-fashioned barrel-organ and raised on a rostrum so that it can be
played standing up. Georg rigged up some piano keys to a Piano Mate,
two synthesisers and a glockenspiel device was adapted from a series
of doorbell mechanism which instead of activating a clapper to hit a
bell now sets of little hammers against glockenspiel bars. There is a
DC current activated by that part of the piano action which is like
hammer, so you can play glockenspiel and piano together or either
separately. Other synthesisers fitted underneath provide bass pattern
from a keyboard and there are one or two secret modifications which
they are keeping secret. The device which is quite unique and their
own patent is now insured for an undisclosed sum and almost priceless.
From www.sailor-music.com/nickelodeon.htm
I'm not sure how much actual innovation is in there, but at least it's based on pianos, so I hope it qualifies as an answer.
Tack piano
The tack piano involves inserting thumb tacks into each of the hammers. As you'd expect from hitting the string with metal instead of felt, the result is a louder but more metallic sound. This was useful in bars, where higher volume was more important than great tone. With the rise in recorded music, and especially with the invention of the jukebox, tack pianos became obsolete.
(1) A variation on the player piano is the Speaking Piano:
YouTube: Speaking Piano
(NOTE: Video narration is in German, but the piano "speaks" in English.)
This is the 2009 work of Peter Ablinger. He processed speech audio using Fast Fourier Transforms, effectively splitting the audio into 88 frequency bands, assigning each frequency to its own piano key. The MIDI data produced by this method is 'performed' by a mechanical device that has a separate actuator for each piano key.
(2) The infinite sustain grand piano uses electromagnetic coils beneath the strings to sustain the notes without decaying to silence. Also, notes can be started without the piano hammer, so the note swells from silence. This is a similar principle to the e-bow used by guitarists to infinitely sustain their notes.
YouTube: Magnetic Resonator Piano
(3) The vertical piano. This uses the same type of string for all notes, rather than using wound strings for lower notes. This means the piano strings must be much longer than they would be for wound strings.
YouTube: Tall Piano
Under the topic of 'experiments', there are 'prepared pianos', where the musician places objects between or on the strings to get special percussive effects. John Cage (Works for Prepared Piano, did this, as did Dave Brubeck (Blues Roots). Of course some of these are rather odd: Sonatas and Interludes.
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