Blaine,
First off, I raise my glass to your provocativity! When first considering any issue, I try to start out with unbridled creative thinking, completely disregarding physical, logistical or financial practicality. If those ideas cannot be realized as conceived, then I start to cut my suit according to my cloth, and dial it back and until it can be accomplished.
The initial idea of the piano is over 300 years old, and yet we are still inventing the piano. Examples of this include new materials used for action parts, sound boards, piano lids and other piano related items.
The era of the Modern Piano was heralded, in part, by the so-called double escapement action of Sebastian Erard. More recently, Darrell Fandrich brought the function of Erard's double escapement action to vertical pianos. Within the last decade, Oliver Esmonde-White and his team have engineered their way to making the regulation of the Fandrich action more practical, and brought it to market at a relatively low price point, in a way that could really catch fire.
FWIW,
Alan
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Alan Eder, RPT
Herb Alpert School of Music
California Institute of the Arts
Valencia, CA
661.904.6483
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Original Message:
Sent: 08-13-2026 02:06
From: Blaine Hebert
Subject: What would an alien piano look like?
Ed, My question had several reasons for asking.
I wondered have we exhausted the potential of our chosen instument? Looking over the last 200 years there have been quite a niumber of experimental innovations, many of which went nowhere, but many are enshrined in our present piano versions. Would a very external view of a similar instrument come up with improvements that we have not yet thought of? I have seen ancient uprights from the heyday of uprights with a few structural and scale innovations that seem worthy of emulation, unfortunately this was often on pianos literally headed to the dump.
I remember the early days of personal computers, when the layout of the keyboard was being seriously questioned. Our present QWERTY keyboard was actually designed to be slow and inefficient to force typists to slow down and not overwhelm the capabilities of early machines. Was our keyboard pattern of three and two sharps against naturals really the most efficient? Many accordianists seem to be pretty musically proficient using the chromatic or diatonic keyboard.
And, is there some yet undiscovered innovation in action design or regulation that improves piano performance even further? The Viennese action persisted even to today because it had qualities that some musicians preferred.
Lastly, I just like being provocative :-b
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Blaine Hebert RPT
Duarte CA
(626) 390-0512
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Original Message:
Sent: 08-12-2026 09:17
From: Ed Sutton
Subject: What would an alien piano look like?
Blaine, you are asking at least three mechanical questions, each assuming certain similarities with pianos.
First, I think we need to ask "What is music to the non-human creature? Does it have any sound qualities in common with the qualities chosen by the piano design?"
To give an example closer to home: The classical Chinese qin, the instrument played by Confucius, had seven strings tuned in a pentatonic scale, and historic technics described 1070 ways to pluck a string! (Modern players use at least 40.) Some notes are played so quietly that they can only be heard in the attentive mind. How would you build a piano for this music?
Perhaps you can clarify your question's purpose.
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Ed Sutton
ed440@me.com
(980) 254-7413
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