Filling a piano with water

In the above video a fellow, for reasons I can't quite fathom, fills up a piano with water to hear what it sounds like. I guess everybody has a dream. Anyway, this is a more difficult project than he first expected. He ends of doing a considerable amount of experimenting, fiddling, and water-proofing a piano before he gets it to work.

There is a short ad in the video, but at least it is about coffee.

 

Innards of a player piano

These days a player piano is little but a curiosity for a collector to own. However, prior to the phonograph they had a purpose in that they could reproduce a piece of music whenever desired and were popular for that reason. 

In the above video Chris Plaola takes off the covers of his player piano and explains it inner workings. It is quite a complicated device.

 

The Von Jankó Keyboard

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While on vacation I stopped at the Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center in  White Springs, Florida. One of the pianos they had on display was the one pictured above, featuring a Von Jankó keyboard.

It had never crossed my mind, but of course piano keyboard layouts are arbitrary and -- like mousetraps -- innovators are bound to try to improve upon them. in 1882 Paul von Jankó devised a keyboard with a 6-6 layout. As described at the Music Notation Wiki:

Because it has an isomorphic layout, each chord, scale, and interval has a consistent shape and can be played with the same fingering, regardless of its pitch or what the current key is. If you know a piece of music in one key you can transpose it simply by starting at a different pitch because the fingering is the same in every key.

This provides much more consistency than the traditional keyboard layout where each chord, scale, and interval has multiple shapes and requires learning multiple fingering patterns. On the Jankó layout there are twelve times fewer chord shapes and scale patterns to learn. This greater consistency also improves awareness of interval patterns and harmony, and makes it easier to improvise and play by ear.

You can go to the following link to fiddle around with Jankó style isomorphic keyboard.
 
Because few pianists were willing to relearn their repertoires for the new keyboard few Jankó style pianos were ever built. Lack of demand eventually led to their demise.