Amazon Quiz (August 5, 2021): How many keys does this instrument most commonly have?
1. 88
2. 61
3. 75
4. 90
Answer: 88
The piano is an acoustic, stringed musical instrument created by Bartolomeo Cristofori in Italy around the year 1700, in which the strings are hit by wooden hammers coated with a softer substance.
It’s played on a keyboard, which consists of a row of keys that the performer presses or strikes with both hands’ fingers and thumbs to trigger the hammers to strike the strings.
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Cristofori devised his “gravecembalo col piano e forte” (roughly translated to: “harpsichord with soft and loud”) in Florence in approximately 1709. This was not the first instrument using keyboard striking action; examples of the piano principle existed as early as about 1440.
The piano, which came in a variety of shapes and sizes, was quite popular in the mid-eighteenth century. German piano manufacturers perfected the square piano because they preferred a lighter, less costly instrument with a gentler touch.
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For residential usage, the upright piano had largely supplanted the square piano by around 1860. Early upright pianos were designed to look like upright harpsichords, with the strings rising above the keyboard. As a result, they were quite tall, and many of them were designed in attractive designs.
The emergence of the electronic, or electric, piano, which depended on electroacoustic or digital techniques of tone generation and was heard through an amplifier and loudspeaker, was an important breakthrough in the twentieth century (starting in the 1930s).
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