I Assume It Doesn't Mean "Sweet Sea"
NB: This is going to start with music-wankery and detour into bad philosophy of science and other intellectual masturbation.
So last night I realized that, basically, a piano is a giant mechanical dulcimer. You have strings under tension tuned to a particular, fixed pitch, and then you deploy hammers (manually w/a dulcimer, via the mechanism of the key w/a piano) to strike those strings and cause them to sound. There just happen to be about 220+ strings (depending on the piano) tuned to 88 different pitches (unless you've got either a very very old piano or a Bösendorfer) sitting in a big wooden and metal box, with 88 dedicated hammers to strike them. Big dulcimer, in other words.
As a child I was interested/perplexed by the question of whether to consider the piano a "string" or a "percussion" instrument - and if percussion, is that because you percuss the keys, or because the keys activate hammers which percuss the strings? In other words, is the instrument classified by the mechanism by which its sound is produced (string) or by how that sound is activated (percussion). As far as I was able to tell last night, the common and best accepted method is to classify via the method of sound production first - so the piano (and the dulcimer) are string instruments along with violins and guitars.
The funny thing is that not every keyboard instrument, therefore, would fall under the same category as the piano. The same system alluded to above (the Hornbostel-Sachs) system further divides string instruments - chordaphones - depending on their method of activation: plucked (w/fingers or a plectrum/pick), bowed, and hammered. The piano, and also the clavichord and the clavinet (the electric clavichord [more or less] manufactured by Hohner during the middle of the last century and providing a super-funky, out of production sound most famously featured on the main riff of Stevie Wonder's "Superstitious") are hammered chordaphones. The harpsichord, on the other hand, is plucked by a quill, and therefore would be classed with guitars, lutes, ouds, and mandolins (etc.); the Fender Rhodes electric piano isn't a string instrument at all, but something like an electromechanical glockenspiel (it strikes metal tines); and the pipe organ is of course a wind instrument. The point being that if you categorize by methods of sound production you lose other compelling familial relationships, like "these are all played via keyboard." But if you lump all the keyboards together you get an equally uncompelling organization.
Adding a historical dimension to this endeavor (called organology) just makes it worse; the lute and the oud derive from a common ancestor but converged as influences on the guitar, the oud used to have frets but is now fretless, and various plucked guitar precursors were influences on the development of the viol(a da gamba) family of fretted but bowed instruments.
Consider that we made all these instruments, invented and designed and deployed them, and you can't come up with a clean and logical way of organizing them. Yet we try to, based on intuition and on some very intuition-driven empiricism. When it came to philosophy and philosophy of science, I've long been possessed of strongly nominalist persuasions. No one thinks their own beliefs are crazy, but I'm as nominalist as you can get without being crazy, I'd say. The chain of thought set off by "Is the piano really just a dulcimer?" led me to another illustration of (one reason) why I'm a nominalist. I'm fundamentally distrustful of the apparently deep-set need for humans to provide an organized facade to our world that is unrealistic and I wonder how distorted the view with which we wind up is. My trump card is always that there isn't a single satisfying definition of the concept "species" that covers every place we've chosen to draw a species line. Some humility is in order when we view the world from our vantage.
That's all. Also, my class might have built dulcimers as a school project back in grade school, but I can't remember; I know we played the recorder a lot. They also might've been Appalachian-style dulcimers, which are fretted and plucked, instead of the piano-like hammered dulcimer.
So last night I realized that, basically, a piano is a giant mechanical dulcimer. You have strings under tension tuned to a particular, fixed pitch, and then you deploy hammers (manually w/a dulcimer, via the mechanism of the key w/a piano) to strike those strings and cause them to sound. There just happen to be about 220+ strings (depending on the piano) tuned to 88 different pitches (unless you've got either a very very old piano or a Bösendorfer) sitting in a big wooden and metal box, with 88 dedicated hammers to strike them. Big dulcimer, in other words.
As a child I was interested/perplexed by the question of whether to consider the piano a "string" or a "percussion" instrument - and if percussion, is that because you percuss the keys, or because the keys activate hammers which percuss the strings? In other words, is the instrument classified by the mechanism by which its sound is produced (string) or by how that sound is activated (percussion). As far as I was able to tell last night, the common and best accepted method is to classify via the method of sound production first - so the piano (and the dulcimer) are string instruments along with violins and guitars.
The funny thing is that not every keyboard instrument, therefore, would fall under the same category as the piano. The same system alluded to above (the Hornbostel-Sachs) system further divides string instruments - chordaphones - depending on their method of activation: plucked (w/fingers or a plectrum/pick), bowed, and hammered. The piano, and also the clavichord and the clavinet (the electric clavichord [more or less] manufactured by Hohner during the middle of the last century and providing a super-funky, out of production sound most famously featured on the main riff of Stevie Wonder's "Superstitious") are hammered chordaphones. The harpsichord, on the other hand, is plucked by a quill, and therefore would be classed with guitars, lutes, ouds, and mandolins (etc.); the Fender Rhodes electric piano isn't a string instrument at all, but something like an electromechanical glockenspiel (it strikes metal tines); and the pipe organ is of course a wind instrument. The point being that if you categorize by methods of sound production you lose other compelling familial relationships, like "these are all played via keyboard." But if you lump all the keyboards together you get an equally uncompelling organization.
Adding a historical dimension to this endeavor (called organology) just makes it worse; the lute and the oud derive from a common ancestor but converged as influences on the guitar, the oud used to have frets but is now fretless, and various plucked guitar precursors were influences on the development of the viol(a da gamba) family of fretted but bowed instruments.
Consider that we made all these instruments, invented and designed and deployed them, and you can't come up with a clean and logical way of organizing them. Yet we try to, based on intuition and on some very intuition-driven empiricism. When it came to philosophy and philosophy of science, I've long been possessed of strongly nominalist persuasions. No one thinks their own beliefs are crazy, but I'm as nominalist as you can get without being crazy, I'd say. The chain of thought set off by "Is the piano really just a dulcimer?" led me to another illustration of (one reason) why I'm a nominalist. I'm fundamentally distrustful of the apparently deep-set need for humans to provide an organized facade to our world that is unrealistic and I wonder how distorted the view with which we wind up is. My trump card is always that there isn't a single satisfying definition of the concept "species" that covers every place we've chosen to draw a species line. Some humility is in order when we view the world from our vantage.
That's all. Also, my class might have built dulcimers as a school project back in grade school, but I can't remember; I know we played the recorder a lot. They also might've been Appalachian-style dulcimers, which are fretted and plucked, instead of the piano-like hammered dulcimer.
Labels: Music, Vaguely Philosophical
posted by medrawt at
01:05
