I think that tone is hard to talk about. It's true that the only thing you have control over when you strike a note is the velocity with which the hammer hits the string. The same velocity at impact will produce the same sound, no matter how much you worry about plucking the keys, or pulling out the sound, or kneading the keys. If the dampers are off, it's impossible to hear anything other than differences in volume (and if you are really close, differences in extraneous mechanical noises).What makes the effect that people perceive as beautiful tone depends on how notes end (ie, how you let the dampers back down) , on voicing of chords, and on the relation between the volume of notes coming one after another. Because the things you have to do to control those factors, specifically subtle control of volume and the speed at which you come off a note, make you feel like you are caressing the key, or whatever you like to visualize, people get the feeling that such things change the tone of individual notes, even when what they do is help you control relations between notes.For example, it seems common to think that you get a mellower more lyrical sound to the extent that you strike the key from a shallow angle rather than from the vertical. I think what is really happening is that you are getting better control of the volume of individual notes. You have to think about vectors. If you strike the key at a very shallow angle your motion is composed of a small component perpendicular to the key, which determines the velocity the hammer strikes the strong, and a large component parallel to the key, which has no effect. So a relatively large change in the force you apply at the shallow angle produces a very subtle change in the force perpendicular to the key, so by striking the key from a shallow angle you can get better subtle control of volume than you can striking the key perpendicularly. When you have subtle control of volume in a line, the line sounds beautiful and people say you have a great tone.There are people who swear that tone is real and that you can change the quality of the onset (independent of the volume) by the manner in which you strike the key. I think that's wrong, but plenty of people think it's right.
Clearly there seems to be a psychological effect. Maybe if you think about kneading versus striking, your body will move different and you'll be more relaxed. And that has an effect on your ability to control the speed of the hammers. So it's not useless to think about pressing versus striking. What do you think?
Indeed. I did not claim that it was useless to think about pressing versus striking. My only claim is that the only thing you can control when you press the key is the velocity with which the hammer hits the string. What thought processes or physical processes you use to exert that control are up to you. All sorts of people use all sorts of images to help them produce a sound. And I tried to give a physical explanation of why stroking the keys at a shallow angle might let you better control small differences in volume and thus produce a more beautiful line. It's likely that many people will prefer to think in images like stroking or plucking or whatever - and they'll use them in combination with careful listening to make a better "tone" (in the sense of better controlled relations between sequential notes). Most people, almost certainly, will not find it especially to think of orthogonal basis vectors of the force vector of their finger.
Just wanted to add, kneading vs striking the keyboard will create a difference in terms of the noise the hand makes, as I was talking about above. This also creates a small but noticeable difference. However no difference was found in terms of controlling the actual hammer.
I subscribe to the notion that instrument noise makes for dirty tone. I think it's fairly agreed upon that stiff muscles lead to ugly, blocked tone, whereas supple muscles lead to richer, resonant tone. The resonance box of the piano amplifies the vibrations of the strings. Stiff, hard impacts with the instrument are reasonable to expect that they produce more noise than well-coordinated, supple, cushioned impacts, and if you have a bunch of other noise also being picked up by the resonance box, it seems logical that this would interfere/diminish with the vibrations created by purely by the strings. I.e. the less instrument noise, the purer tone.Many other instrument likewise sound better when you are supple - think of stiff violinists vs supple violinists for example.But I do not have any actual scientific evidence for that.
I think the question is whether instrument noise is identical as long as the hammers go down with the same force.
Do you mean force or speed? It's the speed at which the key is moving when the hammer is sent away - which is not at the keybed but slightly before - that impacts the volume. I vaguely recall reading this somewhere but maybe I'm making it up but like press down the pedal and - don't actually do this lol - drop a 1kg brick on the resonance box and then compare that to dropping a 1kg brick shaped pillow from the same height on the resonance box. The noise level from the impact is likely to be quite different. They're travelling at the same speed due to gravity but one is a blunt impact with a stiff object, the other is a cushioned impact.
The question is this though. Why does the piano sound bad and harsh when some people play, and beautiful when other people play? Even if the dynamic is piano, forte or or fortissimo. If all that matters is the speed of the hammers, then everyone should have good tone in at least one dynamic. But they don't. What do you think? Why is that?
What makes a harsh sound is not the tone of any individual note, but the relative volumes of simultaneous notes (ie voicing), the duration of notes and the extent they overlap (legato), and the relative volume of sequential notes (phrasing). Banging on the piano without much control will produce a harsh sound, not because there's something special and bad about the attack you make on an individual note, but because when you bang away you have no ability to voice or phrase or carefully control the way you release a note. And the things that people do, under the impression that they will produce a more beautiful sound on individual notes, really work by allowing them more control over subtle differences in voicing and phrasing.
Cortot writes about "impurity of tone" that can be caused by moving the hand in such a way as to cause heaviness to the finger touch. Check out his commented study edition of the Chopin Etudes, Op 25. no. 1 specifically. He had amazing tone so I'd like to think he knew what he was talking about.I do think there is more to tone than just relative volume and voicing.
I like his edition of the etudes and all his exercises. Still, when people, like Cortot, talk about tone they are rarely examining the pure sound of a single note without dampers. They are almost always talking of tone in a musical context. When experiments have been done to look at differences in the "tone" of individual notes struck in different ways, but with the same volume and without dampers, almost nobody can hear the difference, and those who do are hearing different mechanical noises. It is very much unlike a bowed string instrument or a wind instrument, with which it is obviously possible to produce different tone qualities at the same volume.There's nothing at all "less than" or "sterile" about seeing that what is called beautiful tone on the piano is really beautiful, delicately controlled relations of volume and timing between many notes, rather than the sound quality of a single note. Pedalling, too can change the sound quality. And there's not even any particular harm in believing that you can change the tone of individual notes, since the ways of moving that you do under the guise of improving the tone of individual notes often do give you better control over the relations between notes.
What are you basing this on, do you have scientific evidence? Just curious.
Here is a relatively recent article. It is the most positive study suggesting that touch can affect the tone of individual notes, but even it finds the effects to be very small. It contains references to the many earlier studies that found no effect. All of this suggests to me that what listeners hear as a beautiful tone is more related to relations between notes (ie voicing and phrasing) rather than to the tone quality of each individual note. Clearly this is different from the bowed (or plucked) string instruments, and the winds.https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ast/28/1/28_1_1/_pdf
That has me curious if what is a very small effect on an individual note becomes a very large effect when there are many notes, some of which need to be played very loudly to project in a big hall? We all know that some pianists sound heavy and strangled in a big hall no matter how much effort they seem to put in, whereas other pianists seemingly effortlessly fill the whole room with a big, resonant sound.
That's something that I don't think has been the direct subject of experiments, so I couldn't rule it out. Still, in very simple terms, to fill a big hall you have to play louder. To fill a big hall with a beautiful tone you have to play louder and yet not lose the ability to voice and make subtle distinctions in volume and timing between sequential notes. It is easiest to control those beautiful subtleties at a medium volume because at a loud volume there's a risk that your movements will become larger and coarser and less well controlled, and at a very soft volume you are trying to make very small changes in a sound that is already very quiet, or to be more mechanistic, at pianissimo a 10% reduction or increase in hammer speed at impact requires a very small and precise change in the force with which you strike the key.
That might be it. So pianists who struggle to be heard over an orchestra despite using a lot of effort don't have weak tone, but simply aren't able to play loud enough, maybe their movements are effortful but inefficient in terms of bringing enough speed to the keys?
An opera singer projects over the orchestra by learning to modify the shape of their vocal passages in such a way that it emphasizes particular overtones of the fundamental notes they are singing such that those overtones fall in a frequency range in which the orchestra does not produce a lot of volume. So without increasing the total volume of sound they produce, they can, when well trained, cut through the sound of an orchestra by modifying their tone. There is no way to do something analogous on the piano; you cannot change the shape of the soundboard in mid concert. All you have to work with is the total volume. I suspect that almost anyone, by banging hard enough, can make enough noise on a piano to be heard over an orchestra; the difficulty is in produce a large volume of sound and still retaining fine control over voicing and phrasing.
I think there could be something analogous, which is what I have been arguing from the beginning. With good technique, the amount of overtones that resonate are maximized, with poor technique, overtones get choked/killed by instrument noise or hard physical impacts interfering with the resonance box's vibrations. The main note is still heard but there are impurities in or loss of overtones.
Topic: What is "tone"? 