Musical keyboard
A musical keyboard is the set of adjacent depressible levers or keys on a musical instrument. Keyboards typically contain keys for playing the twelve notes of the Western musical scale, with a combination of larger, longer keys and smaller, shorter keys that repeats at the interval of an octave. Pressing a key on the keyboard makes the instrument produce sounds—either by mechanically striking a string or tine (acoustic and electric piano, clavichord), plucking a string (harpsichord), causing air to flow through a pipe organ, striking a bell (carillon), or activating an electronic circuit (synthesizer, digital piano, electronic keyboard). Since the most commonly encountered keyboard instrument is the piano, the keyboard layout is often referred to as the piano keyboard or simply piano keys.
Quotes about the musical keyboard
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- It's hard to make the case that the keyboards of today are the same as those from half a century ago. Their evolution from piano to organ to synthesizer to sampler leaves the former and the latter with less in common than a violin has with a guitar. But tracing the keyboard’s wild journey across the decades gives us a lot of insight into phenomena like “the '80s sound.” The keyboards that dominated their eras shaped not just the music of their time, but the sound of the future. By considering the history of these instruments, we can gain a unique perspective on the trajectory of contemporary popular music.
- Jay Laughton of Reverb.com (March 02, 2016) [1]
