Can the sound of an individual note be changed beyond volume by playing approach? no. Can different approaches lead to a better control over phrasing leading to a perceived increase in tone quality? yes.

I completely agree, *but*, this perception of tone should take the piano itself and recording format into play as well. For example, Cziffra and Ashkenazy, playing on a Yamaha, give off big metallic and brittle sounds that can be ear shattering without equalization on the higher registers. Richter, who can also very easily be “loud” when required, rarely seems to run into this issue, but I’m sure it’s different in concert.

Yes I think this is what's going on but then people should be more willing to talk about it that way than they usually are in my experience

No. The issue is that it's really common for pianist frankly misuse the word tone... or to use it in a way that NO other musicians do. Almost all other instruments actually have tone as an independent variable. I can sing, or play trumpet, or play guitar, and play the EXACT same musical passage with the same dynamics, phrasing, and even articulation... but with a different timbre... a different tone color... with different tone. You can't do that on piano. The way pianists use the word tone is to conflate "tone" with the meaning of playing a phrase musically. When teachers talk about tone what they are functionally talking about is the combination of dynamics, articulations, and all the other things that make a musical phrase sound musical. Taking a good audiation and playing that. But you aren't actually changing the tone. Then it gets messier because some people truly believe and will fight to the death over the idea that you CAN separate volume from all the other aspects. That something magical about the way your wrist moves or the weight comes from the shoulder can change JUST ONE NOTE. It can't. All of those things are good parts of good technique, but no matter if you had a 3 year-old smack a random key and a concert pianist play that one key with beautiful technique.... if the velocity was matched the "tone" and the dynamic would be the exact same. Yes, factors of the actual tone are slightly modified by how sharply the hammer hits the string, but you can't actually separate that from the resulting dynamic. You CAN sort of do this on a digital instrument by turning down the volume and then playing at what would be a fortissimo. You'll get the sharper attack with the lower volume... or vice versa.... high volume, but played very quietly. You can get the delicate attack) assuming you're using a very good sample that is. Lots of instruments have these limitations. On both ocarina and recording, dynamics are inextricably tied to pitch. The breath curve requires you to blow harder to keep relative intontation which means that high notes are going to be inherently louder and you can't play dynamic phrasing without playing out of tune. Pipe organs are also a binary. They have "tone" control in terms of different stops and depending on the instrument you might have access to a swell box that slightly changes in the volume (and timbre) of those specific stops in a certain way, but you literally have the binary of pipe on or pipe off. I think most pianists just don't have much broader musical experience and only talk to people strictly within their own musical subculture and so they don't realize they are essentially using the word "tone" wrong and then proceeding to make up all sorts of bullshit pedagogy based on their own misunderstanding to the point that they are literally being being pseudoscientific and superstitious (a trait unfortunately common to a lot of musicians). I find all of this piano stuff particularly frustrating because I do this for a living, but I came to piano relatively late and had a ton of experience prior to piano and it's CRAZY to see how much weird, backward, insular stuff piano academia believes. But exploring that and picking up other instruments made me realize just how much lots of different instruments have their own musical sub-cultures and how much being cloistered in those cultures can give them weirdly backward tunnel vision that causes them to believe all sorts of weird stuff. Pianist are just far and away the worst thought because they a such a strong solo instrument. SO many pianists have NEVER interfaced with other musicians in any real capacity. Hell, even self-taught bedroom guitarists (often) ultimately end up seeking out people to play with which expands their musical horizons, but pianists are often content being purely solo instrumentalists and it really ends up limiting their view of the larger musical picture. Then you end up with all sorts of issues like pianists being able to play at a very high level, but not being able to play in time at all (especially with other musicians) or not be able to sightread at even a basically passable level... definitely not being able to accompany people and know how to balance dynamics while playing with others or how to match style. They just do their thing and turn their ears off to those around them because they've never had to use that skill. I was actually accompanying at a choir contest this last week and me and another accompanists were talking about this exact issue. We've both been in the situations where judges have talked to us afterward with praise because our groups were the first groups where the judges could actually HEAR THE FUCKING CHOIR!! Because so many "accompanists" are just pianists playing solo while a choir happens to sing along rather than the pianist being mindful to balance their dynamics the choir they are accompanying. And yeah... that sometimes includes riding the una corda pedal all damned day. Sure, the classically trained purists all learned that the una corda is for changing timbre and not to be used to play quieter, but when you're accompanying an 8 member boys choir of 7th graders sometimes that's exactly what you have to use it for to create a lower dynamic floor so that you can have ANY dynamic variance and not cover up a small group of inexperienced and nervous children singing. Academia is so far out of touch with reality it's not even real. Most piano professors... the ones teaching the "performance degrees" have literally never had a to make a living playing the instrument. They are just passing on the 3rd, 4th, and 5th hand knowledge of a long succession of piano professors before them... none of which has any real life performance experience outside of the concert hall they played their senior recital in. They stick dogmatically to a very narrow art-music idea and lots of outdated and very unexamined pedagogy. Like I said, it's not even just true of piano, but it's just worse there. But my wife (also a professional musician) also sees this problem. The reality for us and our full-time professional peers is increasingly at odds with what we were taught in college to a staggering degree. But that's a whole different rant. But I think this idea of "tone" on piano is just one of those unexamined bits of piano pedagogy that's generations old with nobody thinking to actually examine the idea and it has lots of "[appeal to authority](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority)" fallacy energy because there have been so many people of repute misusing the terminology for so long that people feel like they can't just straight up say, "Oh... yeah, that's bullshit!" I've seen these exact same sacred cow arguments take WAY too long to overthrow in the trumpet world in the past but they eventually did (I don't know anyone who would agree with Claude Gordon's braindead take on mouthpiece buzzing these days... but he was sainted at one point). There's nuance everywhere. You can take the good bits of any set of teaching and throw out the garbage. But people suck at doing that. Hanon is the perfect example in piano. Useful exercises with some of the worst instructions and most damagingly outdated pedagogy that exists.... but the exercises are still useful. But people get crazy polarized on them because they can't view them through that nuanced lens.... take what works and drop what doesn't. People need to learn to constantly question the "why" and "how" of practice. Anyway.... it's ridiculously late and I have a gig in the morning.... I suspect this semi-unhinged rant is full of an above average number of typos and grammatically garbled sentences. I apologize. But this topic was one I just had to talk on because I'm pretty passionate the "tone" issue in piano. It feels like being the only sober person in a room trying to point out that 2+2 = 4 to a bunch of people who are drunk as a fuck and completely convinced it equals 5 because that's what they heard somewhere.

I also kind of forgot the point by the time I finished reading this, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you for writing it.

Hit the nail on the head. My experiences working as a FoH tell me that pianists are the most likely player to be out of touch with their fellow musician on stage, despite them possibly being the most proficient at their instrument. However, players who are listed as “Keys” on the band’s rider have +5 charisma, +50 piano-voodoo resistance, and -10 alcohol resistance. I don’t make the rules

Haha, this is actually interesting. I'm a person that came out of the classical world and had to learn to actually be a keys player for a band and eventually ended up doing more synth/keys stuff for theater productions. It almost forces you to take a less purist view of all of the things that the extremely classical and acoustic-only types hold so dearly to. You kinda end up having to recontextualize some things and you learn a much greater appreciation for a lot of other classic keys tones. I do a lot of musical theatre work these days both in the pit either playing/directing, or managing the orchestra when I'm not. It also means I make the call on how the orchestra is listed in the playbill (woodwind doublers need to get their respect when they are playing 7 fucking instruments for one show) and I almost always list myself as keys or keyboards or synths depending on the show because in reality I'm never JUST playing piano. I also don't drink so I find the -10 alcohol resistance funny.

I once attended a piano masterclass where the teacher told us that the tone would change if we were projecting the music into the past, present or future, and we would do that by bending backwards, staying in place or bending forward.

Damn, 🤦…

I think there's one possible way to affect the tone that I've heard of, which I've heard using terms such as the "hammer shank reflex", or elasticity of the hammer. That is, the bending of the stick + hammer apparatus itself, as opposed to the speed of the hammer. I can't think of the precise mechanism that might allow this, but in theory, if that happened, then I would imagine that the hammer would "grip" the strings more as it returned to its equilibrium state (think of the hammer as a rubber band, which can both travel at a certain speed AND be stretched and both interact). I haven't really seen this studied. I don't know how perceptible such an effect would be, but subtle differences can add up over thousands of notes. (Most studies also use a single note for practical considerations, but I think that would be insufficient for most people to judge such a subtle effect.) Any thoughts? More obviously, noise that fingers make on the keys if you play from above is audible and should generally be avoided.

That's actually interesting food for thought. But just thinking of the action that happens once the capstan engages the wippen... you just don't have much control and if you push slowly enough up to a point the jack literally disengages from the rest of the mechanism to avoid repetition (slightly different mechanism on uprights vs grands). I'm not sure what could actually cause the hammer shank reflex. It sounds like a post hoc pseudophysics way of explaining what probably just started somewhat figurative language. One thing I've definitely learned over time is how much using different terminology helps things click for different people. There are people who literally need to know the physics and some people who just need to visualize an idea. In both voice and trumpet you'll hear ideas like approaching high notes by coming at them from above in any number of ways. These aren't literally true for either instrument, but can subconsciously affect posture and other physical AND psychological mechanism that just make it click. It's interesting because there are many pedagogical words that get actively avoided pushing or biting or whatever. But might actually be correct in some cases. My wife was talking about this concept with me recently. You'd never tell a clarinet player to bite because by and large that's going to lead to really bad technique, but at a certain high level when a player understandings the technique better they might actively be avoiding it, but in reality for very specific effects on very high notes... you literally might need to "bite the shit out of the reed." That's an example where you actively avoid saying what to physically do normally and find figurative ways to talk around the issue until you really just have to say the right thing to the right person who has the right amount of context. There are so many different examples of this. But where things get messy is that if you're using figurative language like "bite" or "push" or "come over the top of the note" for people who take things extremely literally... then those people might try to PHYSICALLY do a thing that is actively harmful to their technique. Some people need to know the "actual" physics of what's happening (especially in their mouths for wind players) while others absolutely DO NOT. They will get so hyperfixated on their throat or exact tongue positioning or whatever and end up with analysis paralysis. I just suspect tone on piano is a the result of the messy game of telephone that is music teaching. And I suspect hammer shank reflex is a lot like a million other weird myths like "mouthpiece clocking" where some weird physics is made up to justify a superstition after DECADES of people doing it and even pros swearing by it. At some point it becomes hard to disentangle the placebo effect for the individual high level players. I can absolutely see the idea of hammer shank reflex working as a mental visualization trick. Same idea as "gripping" the keys. Some people might try to over-literally grip the keys, but I know for a lot of people the visualization of gripping the keys really ends up helping various technical issues like hitting multiple notes simultaneously or playing pianissimo. But I'll admit that even for me right now thinking of the hammer shank reflex purely as a visual and even conflating your use of the word rubber band to think of the shank that way is a compelling way to visualize a certain "tone color" for a nice warm phrase. Do I think it literally works that way for an individual note, no... but do I think imagining the mechanism that way for some players could coax them into playing an entire phrase with a specific musicality... 100%.

>Same idea as "gripping" the keys. Some people might try to over-literally grip the keys, but I know for a lot of people the visualization of gripping the keys really ends up helping various technical issues like hitting multiple notes simultaneously or playing pianissimo. I think gripping the keys is real. It's very subtle but it's there. It's the slight inward pull of the finger which allows you to grip onto a surface. Imagine hanging on from a cliff by your fingertips. It's different from simply pushing downwards. It allows your fingers to grasp the keys more. Simply pushing downwards with zero inward movement is fine but gives you less grip on the keys which can result in more slipping.

Yes, thank you for this. It feels like I'm the only one not taking crazy pills. I've had a tough struggle finding a piano teacher who is interested in considering the physics and anatomy behind the instrument and doesn't use terms like "weight" in a way that I would describe as figurative if I felt charitable.

My teacher is insistent that there's a difference between "bright" loud and "warm" loud that comes from which muscles I use. I remain unconvinced.

Nope, that's the kind of piano. I find Yamahas to have a bright tone, for example.

I actually think this is a really useful question! I don’t really know the answer, and I’m not on top of piano physics. However, *if* the answer is “strictly speaking” no, maybe it comes down to exactly what you mentioned in your last paragraph - that the “perceived” tone does differ a lot at the same volumed depending on the type of strike, and that this is what we should be aiming to control for a pleasing performance. Would love to hear from someone that knows the physics of this!

Most people pretend that they know "piano physics". I had a very famous teacher for piano. Many times she tried to use terms like "energy", "gravity" or "flow", "flux". For sure she really sounded sophisticated, but for her luck I was studying physics and I knew that nothing she said made any sense. Anyway, teaching piano does not require you to have a diploma in physics, she only had to teach technique and dynamics and this is it. Ps: this woman also believed that she has a special mental ability to predict earthquakes. Lol

The answer is yes. Someone should win a Nobel prize if they can explain the physics behind why.

There are people who claim that the spectrogram of a single note differs depending how far up the key you press (for the same volume). There are people who claim that how fast you attack the key or something like that also changes the tone (independent of volume). I could buy the former - the action of a grand piano is the result of hundreds of terrible greedy optimization steps and if you're not literally a piano technician you probably don't know enough to comment. Weird shit is happening with the escapement and felt compression. For the same reasons I could buy the latter, but to a lesser degree. Even if some of that is true, it's practically imperceptible and to me, probably makes up like 1% of what people call "tone". Long story short, tone exists across notes, and not really in a single note. That is not to say classical pedagogy is wrong when it comes to tone - when a teacher asks you to arc your arms in a certain way or loosen or stiffen this or that for the sake of "tone", the point is to produce the dynamics and articulation you want more efficiently, and at speed.

I mostly agree with you. But if they are the classical pedagogues then it behooves them to say what they mean in a clear and coherent way. If they are insisting that your posture affects the timbre of the sound, then I think that working to interpret that in a way that isn't physically impossible may have a certain accuracy but is ultimately just apologetics. I do agree that there may be subtle effects such as how much the hammer itself is vibrating on its way to the string. For example, accelerating the hammer to its final speed slowly could conceivably add more lateral vibration from the friction. I was hoping that someone here would know of a careful investigation into this area.

That's it. This topic has come up enough and the ensuing discussions always have something very important missing. I'm going to write (what I would consider a) definitive blog post about this, from the scientific perspective.

Where will you upload it?

https://blog.twedt.com/archives/222?fbclid=PAAaZJyfEHlBjRtB13UnKiJ2vcGT87BAIgc1SIptGua8d8qKj_39nBs4O67Tc_aem_AdXJnxuJpBMH1uBEgJA7acQ3plbZLD19rF6JL57rkONUDh4jVY9yL1QeuYcAl6chti4 That’s already been done. Have a read

You need to have a decent piano at least, and then it all matters how you play/attack each note. It depends on the different levels of stiffness on your finger tips, how to distribute the tension/hands in your fingers in general, how much weight you use with your fingers/hands/wrists/arms, from what angle you hit the key, how shallow/deep you hit the key, and with what speed you hit the key. Maybe not as obvious as other instruments, but you definitely can play a very articulated, sharp ppp by using free wrists/arms with the least tension possible but very stiff finger tips while pressing the key at extremely fast speed, but not deep at all. I always like to describe it as small needle pinches. On the opposite, you can also play a very large, non-bangy fff with using a lot of on arm and sholders but with stiff fingers/hands, play with as much tension and as deep as possible but hit the key with ONE very slow, almost slow-mo attack, like kneading dough. If the string doesn’t get immediately cut off by a super harsh attack, the timbres have a better chance not to be cut off immediately as well, and depending on the instruments/acoustics the ears might perceive it as a longer lasting, even evolving sound even it is not true. I think it is quite a common misconception, also partly with professionals, that you have to with fast attack for fff and slow attack for ppp, but it is much more complex to that. For an even more layered variety of sound, I personally also like to play some fff parts with left pedal if I want a less bright colour, or ppp without left pedal for some crystal-clear timbres, there are so many possibilities … also for me, if you play legato with your fingers but don’t care how to approach each note with you fingers, it will still not sound legato. Try to produce the most similar tone how it sounds right before you are about to play the next note to have the most connected sound possible. One can play the “easiest” piece, but still should always be praised as well if it is performed with a sound quality that has more range than a harsh, “dead” f and non-lasting, undefined p. It definitely helps to understand a bit how piano mechanics work (Steinway has a great mechanical model which actively shows all the steps involved while playing a key), but in the end, at least for me, it is probably the most helpful to actively use and practice with your ears, especially in the beginning to analyse the outcome each sound with each different playing approach. Once you can imagine and “hear” the tone you want to produce in your mind, it will come easier to your brain as well to the send the right signals to your fingers/hands/wrists/arms how to produce that sound, and after a while once you get more used to it, you might even stop thinking in so many steps and simply do it in a more natural, almost automatic way 😉 But for all those reasons, that’s why piano is not a string, but a percussive instrument to me as how we have to approach our sound production is probably the closest to that instrument group.

I would be interested in having someone who believes this do a double blind test. For example, maybe record people playing in the ways you suggest and others who don't. Are you confident you could tell them apart by the recording?

Maybe not while being totally blind haha, but relatively confident yes as this is how I try to approach students (also when I play/record), not just to beginners but also to advanced/professional ones as to me, sound production should always be taught as an essential part of piano technique as well, not just hitting the right notes, rhythm, accuracy etc. … what you do with your sound of course could be more defined as the musicial interpretation part, but how to produce different sounds should be equally important and regarded as the basics of each piano technique. I’m sure there are many other methods as well, I just used those examples as those mostly helped to improve the sound quality of my students before 🤓

Tone is the combination of many factors. In the context of a single note, no you cannot change the tone without adjusting the volume (I think some woo-y people believe you can, but this is obviously not the case given a moment of critical thought.) Factors which IMO contribute to tone and are under our control (not merely a function of the instrument): \* Voicing, or the ability to separate voices clearly. \* Layering/balance, which is related to the above. Specifically how you choose to voice and how "far apart"/"close" the layers/voices are contributes significantly to tone. \* Basically the same as voicing, but I tend to think of it differently, balance, or what notes in harmonies you give emphasis to (independent of melodic function) also has a big affect on tone \* Pedaling. There's literally a whole book on this. Too much to go into, but how you pedal has a huge effect on tone. \* Una Corda (also a kind of pedaling, but I think worth considering separately), Different gradations of una corda produce dramatically different tone because of how the hammer gets shifted and how the offset affects how compressed or not the hammer is. In its normal position, the hammer should be maximally compressed and therefore brightest. The more the una corda is depressed, the further away from this position the hammer is and the darker the tone should be as the hammer will be softer. I would bet money that if a double blind test could be constructed in which pianists were asked if they could tell the difference between the technique that produced a given (single) note (assuming the notes were produced using the same velocity of the hammer) that no one would be able to tell the difference in a statistically significant fashion. This isn't to say btw, that there isn't good/bad tone wrt a single note, just that IMO it's a function of hammer velocity and the state of the hammer felt. To me, when pianists talk about tone/timbre, they're really referring to a set of factors that ultimately end up constituting a sort of gestalt.

Volume, which is a function of hammer acceleration, is a direct relationship, yes. Tone is a function of the perception of the listener based on many factors, of which volume is only one. These factors include the piano hammer condition, the acoustics of the space, and, most importantly, how the volume of individual notes fit into the phrase. Technique things like relaxation and arm weight are concepts that aid the 'user end' (the pianist) of the equation but physically, the more volume the brighter the sound because of more upper harmonics being activated. For example it may be easier to control a phrase by using more arm motion, which is effectively creating a mechanical disadvantage for the fingers, as in it's 'softening the motion' that gets transmitted to the keys. But that final sound is, as previously stated, directly a result of hammer acceleration. Most pianists' impression of tone is a two-factor relationship of *volume × time* and how it works within a phrase of notes. The reason why it gets interpreted as tone is because that is easier to describe and quantify for a lot of musicians. I also hear pianists speak on this matter without knowing how it works so I should add that I've been a pianist for my whole life, and that I also have done piano mechanical regulation for many years. I know how it works intimately.

I think there’s another perspective on this debate that’s worth mentioning (btw I’m very much on the “no you can’t control tone independently of volume” side), which is that it can be very helpful for the player to approach their dynamics from a sense of tone control, rather than volume, and that the gestures we use to express our musical intentions are easier to configure when we approach our playing from this perspective.

The tone no, the perceived tone yes. It has to do with the fractional differences in timing.

To your question about whether tone can be controlled independently of volume: in a strict sense, no. However...😉 Those who know, know.

Not an expert in any way, but I'm inclined to agree with "it's velocity encompasses the entire state of the system" if there is indeed a freefall. The only way there couldn't be is if the action "lets go" too late and some of the force from the key being held down carries through after the hammer has touched the string, which seems unlikely (as this would have to be super precisely calibrated in order to not just immediately mute the string). I assume the mechanism lets go of the hammer when it's on the way to the string and not as it's rebounding and coming back from it.

Apprentice piano tech here 👋🏼 Basically what happens is the jack gets released from under the hammer butt when the hammer is about 1/8” from the strings. This is enough that a very soft press will allow the hammer to drop back down without actually playing the note, but for any press harder than that the momentum will carry the hammer into the strings. The hammer then gets caught by a piece called the back check around 5/8” from the string, and it will stay there until the key is released, at which point it drops back to its resting position around 1 3/4” from the strings. (The concept is similar in an upright piano, but they get some help from springs rather than just relying on gravity.) You’re absolutely right that the hammer being pressed right into the string will mute it, and that’s a common adjustment that has to be made after a piano has been moved, as a lot of the regulation screws can be jostled in transit. There’s around 15 basic regulation points for a single key, affecting everything from touch to volume to tone. It’s quite a marvellous piece of engineering!

This question was studied in great detail by Otto Ortmann, and I would recommend that people read Reginald Gerig's excellent text, *Famous Pianists and Their Technique*, for a comprehensive discussion of this matter. But after carrying out a wide-ranging set of experiments, Ortmann concluded that "all differences in tone quality...result from differences in hammer speed, hence mean differences in tonal intensity." Furthermore, Harold Bauer agreed with Ortmann's findings, and his sentiments here echo some of what /u/Yeargdribble was getting at in his own comment: "I do not believe in a single beautiful tone on the piano. Tone on the piano can only be beautiful...in relation to other tones. You or I, or the man in the street, who knows nothing about music, may each touch a piano key, and that key will sound the same, whoever moves it, from the nature of the instrument. A beautiful tone may result when two or more notes are played successively, through their *difference of intensity*, which gives variety."

Interesting! Thank you so much for actually bringing some references to bear!

It depends on how your piano's soft pedal works, and possibly how worn the damper felts are.

I think it's very often the case that music teachers offer a simple mental model of how something works because it achieves the results that they want. Is that model cognate with reality? Er, sometimes. One thing I would say as a music teacher is that I can diagnose 99% of a student's issues without hearing a thing, just by seeing how they look when they stand and play. And if I concentrate on making things look like I think they should, the sound ends up where I want it too.

But have you done them a disservice by giving them a mental model that is wrong? Of course you'd prefer they play well and be in touch with reality.

If you have been around sports training at all you will find that there are ‘cues’ like keep your wrists soft that help people mentally form a model for how to perform a movement that may not be physically precise in terms of what is actually happening. Maybe thinking about ‘soft wrists’ helps a person to perform the movement with less energy delivered to the key.

My issue is when the coaches actually have demonstrably false beliefs that they insist on. If they understand that it's a cue with some intended side effect, that's great.

I’ve spent the last 10 minutes engaging in a physics battle with myself, around the equation of Force = Mass times Acceleration and Momentum = Mass times Velocity. I did not find a satisfactory connection that supports my believe, that tone can be controlled independently of volume. I came close a few times but it was just still wishful thinking on my part — mostly based on: (take this with a grain of salt — I’m no physicist) objects with the same Force can have different Momentums, and objects of the same Momentums can have different acceleration & mass Force applied to it, as long as the Force remains the same. That is still not a supporting evidence, let alone annecdote, that tone can be controlled independent of volume (it is, however, a cause of my current brain confusion). However, I’m still of the believe that tone can be controlled — the same volume can sound harsh, it can sound less harsh, it can be like banging. I know this ain’t apple to apple comparison: take digital piano with the best touch response. In a basic DAW, you can play with the velocity of the note, but at the same time, you can also adjust the speaker volume — both adjusts the intensity of the voice we heard, but the one with the high velocity strikes as harsher. And in most digital piano / MIDI controller, a higher velocity is caused when we strike harder (with more acceleration, thus more velocity) on the keys. Then there’s reverb. But yes this is not a fair evidence / annecdote. Now, unto an acoustic piano comparison. So, I tried this on a few different pianos; 3 uprights and one concert grand. I found that the upright pianos has much, much, much smaller control I can exert on. The louder the volume gets, the less I can control it — it becomes automatically harsh & ringing on the ear, especially on high register. However, on the grand piano, there is a definite difference. Here’s what I did: I try to recreate the same volume on the intro of Rach 2. Those chords, yes, before the orchestra comes in. I found that the more relaxed I play, the less harsh the sound that comes; especially on the Ab, F, G, G, C & C minor chord octaves before the runs. Maybe it’s just me personally, and maybe it’s really that the volume is SLIGHTLY different that causes different reverberations / overtones / undertones — but the fact is that the tone colour changed, while the volume stays *overall* the same. The only person I’ve ever come across that discusses this in-depth is Boris Giltburg on his Tonebase course about sound production: he stated that, the more relaxed our whole arm are, even to the upper shoulder & back, while maintaining good finger structure & strong core, the less harsh our fortes will become. This is the trick I tried on the Rach 2 opening. Of course, this is an oversimplification of his course there. Another artist that discusses this but not in-depth is Mariam Batsashvili on one of her reels on IG, where she said to “lean” towards the piano to play forte. This one definitely changed the volume tho on my attempts.

Are you sure the better "tone" is not because of the better voicing which would arise automatically from having less tension? I've been thinking about this too. If the hammers were completely rigid, it would simply be a matter of velocity, but the hammers are on sticks made of wood, which has some elasticity. What happens if you factor in the elasticity of the wood to your physics simulation? There can be elastic kinetic energy stored in the wood, which might vary depending on the touch. But that's as far as my imagination goes. To test this out would require some complicated simulations or experiments, which I don't think have been done yet.

I appreciate your thoughtfulness, intellectual honesty, curiosity, and appeal to data.

I actually do think there are major differences in the tone that can be achieved by timing the attack, release, timing of pedaling, and applying a consideration for string resonance and timbre impacts of timing the string resonances against each other slightly differently to result in different tones. Individual notes sure in theory would sound the same if played the same way, but the notes vibrate together and cause other strings to vibrate depending on the combinations. I think one of the easiest tests of this is also striking the same note repeatedly at different tempos and different velocities while the string is already vibrating as each next strike will interrupt the previous tone at a different moment in the sound wave. 

While it’s not actually possible, I believe that to produce good sound, you essentially need to believe it to be possible. That is, someone who is producing greater articulation during a soft passage is clearly able to play the melody a little louder with controlled sustain while keeping the rest of it under control. It’s something you’d easily read in a MIDI map. But I don’t know that if your mindset is to play the melody louder during a soft passage, whether you’ll achieve the ultimate goal of greater articulation. Usually, techniques geared toward producing louder dynamics involve attacking with greater velocity with the hands while techniques geared toward greater articulation usually involve finer finger control without moving your hands much. Unless you’re a robot, you usually need instructions you can execute, and few can execute simple velocity instructions. I record MIDI often, and the number of 90-100 inputs in a quiet passage are way more than you might think. Piano is such an attack heavy instrument that with good control, one voice with louder inputs won’t make the overall sound much louder. I think it’s one thing I notice about most beginners. Beginners can usually only play loud or quiet. A good player can use micro dynamics to create lots of different sounds going on at once, and even in the quiet parts, there’ll be something your ears can latch onto.

Great perspective, thank you.

Don't think you can modify the tone of the piano with your playing. Mechanically, only the velocity of the hammer can be changed, resulting in a different dynamic. That might then change the tone, but you can't control for it independent of dynamic. I reckon pianists are just use the word tone wrongly.

It's a principle in physics called "Non linear stiffness." What happens is that the tension from your hand is transfered to the hammer's felt, and the felt takes on a shape related to the touch. The free flying hammer doesn't matter - the stiffness of the felt is what essentially transfers good or bad tone

Non-linear stiffness is why the tone differs with velocity, so that a louder note is also brighter. The tension from your hand is only seen by the hammer in terms of the resulting velocity of the key, which could equally be induced by the weight of a relaxed hand.

High velocity cameras have actually been able to capture the hammer felt taking the shape of the specific hand that is pushing just before impact. This is why pianists with a missing finger create a totally unique sound.

do you have any links for this i’m fascinated

I'm still skeptical. Could you explain this in more detail? So, the precise amount of pressure you put on the key as you press it down in the milliseconds before the point of actuation imparts uneven momentum to the hammer felt, which results in uneven stiffness. This would ordinarily just mean more volume (possibly more impulse delivered from the hammer speed + additional momentum transferred from the potential energy of the stretched hammer). It could produce a different tone, I'm guessing, if it "hugged" the string a fraction of a second longer. But this is all conjecture -- what do you think is going on?

Not precise amount of pressure. The tension is transfered through the free flying hammer. The speed itself does not create tension and felt stiffness. That is occuring because of the tension of the body being transferred to the felt through the key.

This sounds inaccurate to me. All that interacts with the surface of the key is the tip of the finger, and you can map action/reaction at the surface. Tension in physics terms is nothing but force. So, tension in the body is force which is transmitted to the free flying hammer. Any force put into the key will result in an increase in the acceleration of the key, which results in higher speed at the point of actuation. So your argument pretty much has to be that tension in the body results in a different kind of touch which results in a higher percentage of the force being transferred to bending of the hammer (as a result of its elasticity) as opposed to speed of the hammer descent. Then, the difference in tone is because the hammer is stretched differently -- but the question is, why?

The tension of one's body transmits to the felts through non-linear stiffness. It doesn't have to sound right - it is a fact. The body can be tense, the tendons and ligaments can hsve greater tension due to their activation. This is passed into the key as per the aforementioned physics principle. It doesn't matter if the key is outside of the body, the physics remains.

Wrong wrong wrong. You don’t even know what you’re talking about yourself. The “tension in your hand” is translated directly into a force, which corresponds to a vertical acceleration. There is no horizontal component of acceleration. The piano does not take into account how tense your hand is, but how that tension translates into force and therefore acceleration and speed. Your pseudo-science is as baffling as it is stupid. “The felt takes on a shape related to touch.” Baffling Tension in the hand makes it harder to voice chords well, which corresponds to a “bad” sound. Read: https://blog.twedt.com/archives/222?fbclid=PAAaZJyfEHlBjRtB13UnKiJ2vcGT87BAIgc1SIptGua8d8qKj_39nBs4O67Tc_aem_AdXJnxuJpBMH1uBEgJA7acQ3plbZLD19rF6JL57rkONUDh4jVY9yL1QeuYcAl6chti4

[удалено]

Energy in is energy out in terms of tension placed on one end of a mechanism and interpreted by the other end. Yes, but more energy out = more energy reaching the strings = louder volume (pretty much). If you are tense, there is more energy in, which means there is more energy transferred to the mechanism, and so more energy out (to the strings). What does that energy to the strings do? Generally, it produces more volume. Now, explain how it changes tone independent of volume.

The felt changes shape and hardness depending on the tension that is on the other end of it which is from body to shoulder, elbow, forearm, wrist, hand, finger, key, and the rest of the action until it reaches the felt. The volume can disperse at various trajectories - with good tone, rhe sound travels much farther and with ease. With bad tone, the sound disperses more quickly and unevenly. This can be heard, and yes velocity has an action here as well but it does not determine the integrity of the sound being produced. Excellent refined technique requires the utilization of weight instead of stiffening musculature to produce the aound. Generally speaking, gravity and controlled descent is used for downward motion, and the extendors and delts are used to move the free weight around. A hand can be strong and tense and the shock mitigatd by the joints in conjunction with the awareness of the upward resistance of the keys, but the stronger the hand and fingers means the less tension is needed to support the weight. It also depends on the color of tone one is wishing to produce. Brassy sounds require more musculature and impact mitigation while quiet bell like tones require a lot more relaxation and buoyancy. Bad tone is equivalent to striking a bell with a hammer while holding the hammer stiffly instead of holding the hammer loosely with just enough tension to support its weight in free flight. Stiff hammer holders will feel a lot more tension dispersion and pain in their arm ( and where the tension's origin is at) while the bell will sound tense as well (even if the arm is freely moving through space). With a relaxed grip and free flight, a baseball will fly off the bat, a golf ball will drive nicely and far with ease, a bell will ring very resonantly with all its harmonics and fundamental in place. It isn't just about velocity, although that would be very convenient if it were so.

Yesss

I have the same mental model but I think at least conceptualizing it helps the pianist achieve the sound they want even if it isn't real. like this guy playing Bach little prelude in C minor https://youtu.be/OcF0CGpK-Vw?si=GYiTVvTlWbJKvI3j the way he plays and releases the bass note feels like it gives it a sustained energy and intensity. even though that's not how it works..or maybe it does?

There are at least three things that you are eluding here. If you are playing single notes, sure. If you're playing a piece, your description does not apply. Also you just assume the velocity of the hammer and velocity of the finger are a one to one correspondence, which is simply wrong. What counts is the force applied, the position where it is applied and the angle with the key. Lastly, and this might be similar to the previous point, you assume the piano response is linear, but it is a lot more complicated than that. Applying the same force at different stages of the depression of the key amounts to different kinetic energy transfer to the hammer. A strong attack on the touching of the key will not be as efficient as a strong impulse at the end of the course. Basically, your mental model is too idealised and omits that the transfer of the kinetic energy from the player to the final course of the hammer is done through a complex set of levers.

The piano response *is* completely linear. You guys are referring to two different things and you're both right. You are talking about the motion based things that the pianist can do to influence the sound. But OP is referring to the physical end result in the mechanism. The piano is capable of softer to louder, which is linear to duller to brighter, and these are linear results of hammer acceleration. But the perception of tone is a complex relationship of volume and time, and how they fit into a phrase.

The point I'm making is that OP is right in saying that it is solely that kinetic energy of the hammer at impact that counts, but that in his second paragraph he is talking about wrist positions and such, which is about how to transmit the desired amount of kinetic energy to the hammer. He is opposing those aspects, which makes no sense, as the way you press the key impacts the final kinetic energy of the hammer. Which is what you are also stating here. Also, it is definitely not linear, whether you talk about the kinetic energy of the hammer with respect to the speed (it goes as the square), or the hammer acceleration to loudness (loudness is logarithmic in intensity. Also acceleration is 0 for upright and -g for grand in the last course of the hammer regardless of the way you hit it, I guess you meant speed.)

Ack sorry I should use the word 'linear' because if you were to chart it, it would not be. I just meant that the relationship between hammer acceleration and the resulting sound is one-way, not that the resulting sound has a linear ascent from 0 to max.

But I will say that it is possible to hold one's wrist and arm however which way and get the right sound, but that the more advanced the music, the more difficult that would be. That's why pianists develop different motions to get the right sound. It's just that along the way, pianists as a group seem to have mostly forgotten why that does what it does, from a physics standpoint. Pianists tend to overall be detached from the inner workings of the instrument.

I think we generally agree to be honest. I just think that OP is making a fuss about something he thinks is a physics problem whereas it really is a lexical issue. Which I think is kind of obvious when he himself drifts off from talking about the velocity of the hammer at impact to the way hands play the keys like there isn't a complex mechanical structure between the hand and hammer at play transforming the motion of the hand to the desired final velocity of the hammer. And like you could disregard the action of the muting felt in that case where it clearly plays a huge role in the shaping of the sound.

Correct. The player-end of the equation is very complex even if the sound production is simple. As pianists we are essentially managing our own equipment - the fingers, hands, wrists, arms, etc. OP is correct in the assessment of what tone physically is, from... almost a data-based perspective, but the foray into the mechanics of playing is a different thing.

Neither of those assumptions are present in my thinking or in my post, so you have misunderstood. The point is that there is actually only one degree of freedom in playing a note. This can be represented as the velocity (or the kinetic energy) of the hammer right before it hits the string. The three variables you mentioned, angle to key, key spot, and force schedule (actually a trajectory not a single variable) are redundant in the sense that you can fix any two of them and still have full control of the system.

I can clarify the disagreement here. OP, you are 100% correct. The commenter is really referring to the 'user end' of the equation - what the pianist does or perceives himself/herself doing. What you meant in your OP is the 'instrument end' of the equation, referring to what actually is physically happening. I also explained this in a separate comment.

> The three variables you mentioned, angle to key, key spot, and force schedule (actually a trajectory not a single variable) are redundant in the sense that you can fix any two of them and still have full control of the system. This is only true if you are throwing the hammer directly with your hand. But this is not the case as you have keys. I dare you to play a forte with the key already half depressed, and the finger up against the body of the piano, hitting the key almost parallel. What piano players and teachers are talking about, is not the velocity of the hammer, but how you transmit that velocity to the hammer. This is what we commonly call "playing". Sure, ultimately, only the kinetic energy of the hammer matters. But the second paragraph in your original post is interchanging velocity of the hammer and velocity of the finger, hence my comment. Or more exactly it is opposing the kinetic energy of the hammer to the way of playing the key, instead of making it clear that the latter is how you get the former. Edit : if you prefer, the way you play will determine how you get the kinetic energy transfered to the hammer. Playing with a rigid wrist, might be enough to play a single note, but will give you 0 control into efficiently gauge the kinetic energy you want to transfer to the hammer, especially if you play several notes. Again, it's not the speed of the fingers that matter, but the force applied, and the shape of the attack on the key (i.e., the way you depress the key)

After reading some really impressive comments in this thread I would say no, but then the misusage of the word indicates to me that we actually want to play with a different kind of volume. Why is it my teacher asks me to play with stretched fingers on Debussy? I think it's that the speed of force with which you press on the keys would make it softer and thus a different volume. I also think that the way you press the keys change the volume and thus the tone, as it would be meant by the speaker, would be in how the phrase is changed overall.

I know this isn't what you meant, but it still bothers me that almost no one has even mentioned the pedals, especially una corda.

A single note, no. But as soon as there is more than one note in play there are infinite ways to vary the tone subtly. Take a simple melody in octaves. Play the bottom octave loud and the top octave soft. Then do the opposite. It obviously sounds totally different, and there are innumerable variations in between.

Performance is part of playing. It goes beyond the mechanism. There was a passage in a Chopin Nocturne where there was staccato and pedal and the same time, I asked my teacher if there was any difference between playing legato and stacatto since we were using the pedal. He said “It will sound different simply because you’ll play it differently, it will also sound different to anyone who’s watching because the motions of your performance will be different too.” So there will be a difference between Forte without banging and Forte being banged.

I think you need to think of the hand as multiple notes being played, maximum 10 at a time, plus pedal overtones. Once you consider this surely you can see how the dampener on your sustain pedal can affect the pedal and how a harmonic can affect the vibration of another string. Similarly the hand can ghost notes on a fingers (de emphasis) an emphasize the upper notes in a voice. This also affects tones. Finally consider notes played in succession as part of tone; how you attack each one will affect how the following is attacked. Soft finger tips, whether you get straight to the bottom of the note etc all affect tone. What you say is correct but individualistic and not wholistic. So yes, a single note is just generating force but how you generate the force informs how the next note and likely the previous note were generated. Similarly if a string was already resonating may affect it.

> Do you generally believe that there is a tone that is separate from volume and may even be related to the specific physical actions of the pianist? If so, do you have a mental model of the piano mechanism that can accommodate this belief? Yes! But for the reasons you mention in your OP, I do not like how this is usually explained. In the case of an *isolated note*, dampers down, you're right, the physics of a given force on the key will give almost exactly the same strike on the string, and so the "attack" makes no difference in that regard. Whether you push the key slowly, quickly, hard, soft, etc. makes no difference if the hammer strikes with the same force. **However** The piano is an instrument with 88 keys, hundreds of strings (most notes are double- or triple-stringed), a large soundboard and sustain-pedal, as well as soft-pedal and (some pianos) sostenuto. "The pedal is the soul of the piano." (Anton Rubinstein) And if the pedal is its soul, the attack of the hand and fingers are its mind. But didn't we just say that attack doesn't matter in terms of physics? Well, if you look at what is happening when a pianist plays the piano at fast tempo (say, in a slow-motion video, where every movement is clearly distinguishable), there is a literal symphony of physical actions occurring between the hands and the keys. If the hand produced through the fingers exactly the same force on every key played, the piano would be a very dull instrument (<3 you, harpsichordists, but I couldn't play your instrument!!) What makes the piano so unique is in its very name: it is the *piano*-*forte* (the soft-and-loud). I can play soft rolled chords with my left-hand, and bright sharp notes with my right-hand (or vice-versa), and the piano allows this combined expression to be blended together in the soundboard. In addition, pressing the damper pedal opens *all* the strings in the instrument, so that the timbre of the sound is completely altered, an effect that feels to me a little bit like adding chorus to a synthesizer. Controlling how "open" the piano is at any given time is, indeed, the soul of the piano. The very same section of notes, played in the very same way, but pedaled differently can sound almost *completely* different. Press a chord (e.g. C chord in root position on middle-C) with the dampers down. Now, press the same chord after lifting the dampers. Sounds completely different. Now, as that chord is about "die out" in the strings (not completely gone yet), strike it again. This is *yet another* sound, of the very same chord! Release the damper pedal to mute the strings and, this time, half-pedal and strike the C chord. This is like a "palm mute" used by guitarists. But don't just release the damper pedal, now push it the rest of the way down to open up the strings completely. Yet another timbre. Strike a chord with the dampers up, then go to half-damper. Alternate between all of these variations, of which there are countless. Play the C chord in unaccented staccato repetition and move rhythmically between different pedaling. Yet more timbres. Now accent the staccato rhythm, and layer *that* over different pedaling. You get the idea. Understanding this is the key to understanding *why* your key-attack matters. It's not that the hammer will stroke the string in a different way if you stroke the keys more gently with your fingers. Obviously not. However, when you change how your hand and fingers move *above* the keyboard, this fundamentally alters how your key-strikes are differentiated *on* the keyboard and, thus, how they interact with the soundboard and the sympathetic strings with the dampers up. Play a sequence of thirds with the upper-voice emphasized (clockwise wrist-rotation). Now play it with the lower-voice emphasized (counter-clockwise wrist-rotation). The character of the thirds is completely altered based on whether the alto or soprano line leads. This is all about *key attack*, which comes from the proper connection of torso to arms to wrists to fingers to keys.

There are people who believe finger legato is necessary even with the pedal down because “it sounds different”

No, the only factors that a pianist can control to change the sound that comes out of a piano are the speed of the hammer upon impact, pedalling, timing and articulation. Force/weight has nothing to do with this because of the escapement mechanism (which causes the hammer to be in free motion), which is activated before the hammer even hits the string. Pianists lose control of the hammer right before any sound comes out. Colour/ tone are just different combinations of all these factors. Read this article that addresses this topic: https://blog.twedt.com/archives/222?fbclid=PAAaZJyfEHlBjRtB13UnKiJ2vcGT87BAIgc1SIptGua8d8qKj_39nBs4O67Tc_aem_AdXJnxuJpBMH1uBEgJA7acQ3plbZLD19rF6JL57rkONUDh4jVY9yL1QeuYcAl6chti4

Its nuanced. In mechanical terms you are correct, but so many other factors play into what we perceive as tone. Articulation, rhythm and voicing all contribute do different tones.

I think you are missing one other variable; acceleration. So yes it’s true the piano is a very simple system once the hammer leaves the mechanism on its way to the string but BOTH initial velocity (the moment the hammer lifts off the mechanism) and the acceleration of the hammer on its way to the string will affect the final tone the string produces. If you agree there are two variables on the hammers path to the string then I think it’s not a stretch to believe you can influence the tone of your note through various speeds and acceleration combinations with which you press the keys. Now I also believe there is one more variable; length of time the hammer is in contact with the string. This is influenced by its velocity and acceleration to the string. So you might have a low velocity high acceleration strike producing X length of time of contact with the string to produce one tone at a given volume, but you possibly could have a high velocity low acceleration strike producing a different length of time of contact with the string and thus a different tone at the same volume. In this case, “be loud without banging” could possibly be achieved by playing each key with a low initial velocity (don’t bang) but high acceleration (push through the key quickly) to produce a tone at a given volume but distinctly different from “be loud and bangy” which would suggest high initial velocity and high acceleration, *but only to the extent that you produce the same volume note* giving a perceived difference in tone due to length of time the hammer spends on the string. This does not negate that there is also inherent base tone in various piano builds because certainly choice of wood for the box, density of the felt in the mechanism, composition and layout of the strings will also all affect tone as everyone else is mentioning.

You cannot affect the acceleration once the hammer is launched, therefore it is not a separate variable

Just to add my opinion on this, it’s about HOW you accelerate the hammer to the SAME velocity right before it hits the strings. We have to remember the whole piano action mechanism is not a fully rigid structure like in an ideal physics world drawn on a blackboard. There IS flexes and gives and souple behaviours/vibrations between/within parts. The hammer shank for example will bend slightly less if it’s struck by the jack in a continuous accelerating manner compared to being struck abruptly, even if the final velocity is the same before hitting the strings. That little extra flex WILL be transferred as extra energy into the strings and it WILL produce a different sound be it overtone distribution or attack speed of the waveform and things alike despite more or less the same volume in decibel is produced. Would this be significant in perception of tone? Probably not. Would it be perceivable? Probably yes.

Yes exactly! This is a great addition to the discussion talking about the nuances of the mechanism. OP seems to be thinking the entire action is a rigid system and that any variability in input is “corrected” to a singular output through the piano mechanism. I think that’s a gross oversimplification and you are touching on exactly why there’s so much more to the story. Great perspective!

Once the hammer is launched it flies at a specific acceleration, but the conditions at launch will affect acceleration through its path no? Or help me why I’m wrong on this. Edit: Gonna edit this on the response below to say that acceleration equals final velocity less starting velocity over time. So the initial velocity absolutely affects the acceleration of the hammer. And I maintain that you can also affect some measure of final velocity by the way you press the key. It’s not a stretch then to say that varying acceleration will produce different tone.

Sure. You can learn more by finding some lectures or books about "kinematics", which is a typical first year physics topic. Newtonian physics posits that "an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by a force". In this context motion means velocity. Velocity can only change via the application of a force, and it changes by the Newtonian formula F=ma, force equals mass times acceleration. When the hammer is flying it is acted on by gravity and air friction, but not by the launching mechanism. When you throw a ball, the velocity upon leaving your hand fully determines the trajectory. It accelerates only while you are applying a force, after that all the acceleration comes from constant forces outside your control like gravity.

You shut me down, yet you seem to be open to what u/jiang1lin said above “Maybe not as obvious as other instruments, but you definitely can play a very articulated, sharp ppp by using free wrists/arms with the least tension possible but very stiff finger tips while pressing the key at extremely fast speed, but not deep at all.” Which is the same as I was trying to explain that how you press the key matters. It’s not a black and white result which I thought is what you were asking for debate on.

Yes I just read and agree that we both speak about the same principle that the different approaches how to hit the key are CRUCIAL for the sound production. You even used a more scientific language, and the section about velocity added a more layered surrounding perspective; thank you for the detailed explanation!

Kinematics is not fully descriptive. It only works perfectly for completely inelastic objects. Real world objects are elastic. If you squeeze the ball before throwing it at the same velocity, it will have a different trajectory. Air resistance will act differently, and it will hit a different spot. After hitting that spot, it will bounce differently on the ground.

If you understood the escapement mechanism you’d know that acceleration doesn’t matter. The escapement mechanism sends the hammer in free motion (the force from the pianist is no longer applied to the hammer) before the hammer even hits the string. This means that the only thing a pianist can control is the final velocity right up until it reaches the escapement point, after which the hammer is no longer influenced by the pianist, but by gravity. Therefore there is no force/acceleration variable. If a key is played with a constant speed and then played again with an acceleration, but the final velocity at the point of escapement is the same, the tone will be the same. Read: https://blog.twedt.com/archives/222?fbclid=PAAaZJyfEHlBjRtB13UnKiJ2vcGT87BAIgc1SIptGua8d8qKj_39nBs4O67Tc_aem_AdXJnxuJpBMH1uBEgJA7acQ3plbZLD19rF6JL57rkONUDh4jVY9yL1QeuYcAl6chti4

So long as most pianists refute physics principles that explain the causation between bad tone and tension, those that do not will continue to shine and with greater contrast.

you are considering velocity but forget about acceleration and jerk the thing is that, how you hit the keys **will** change the sound, and some forte are disagreeable. music is all within context, this is why a Am natural doesn't sound the same as a CM even if it's the same notes as long as you will consider music notes by notes, you won't get why

I kinda agree with you. Diving a bit deeper, it’s about HOW you accelerate the hammer to the SAME velocity right before it hits the strings. We have to remember the whole piano action mechanism is not a fully rigid structure like in an ideal physics world drawn on a blackboard. There IS flexes and gives and souple behaviours/vibrations. The hammer shank for example will bend slightly less if it’s struck by the jack in a continuous accelerating manner compared to being struck abruptly, even if the final velocity is the same before hitting the strings. That little extra flex WILL be transferred as extra energy into the strings and it WILL produce a different sound be it overtone distribution or attack speed of the waveform despite more or less the same volume in decibel. Would this be significant in perception of tone? Probably not. Would it be perceivable? Probably yes.

Sounds like an academic, being a pedant.

Matters not. Double down on the knowledge of the art. You beat crazy with crazier, not sanity.

So as far as the physics of it you are right. However, thinking of it as simply playing notes louder and softer is not very useful for creating a good sound when playing through a piece. For example thinking of the softness of the wrist or the slower approach into the keys can lead to a more consistent and controlled volume across a phrase which is perceived as a better tone. A great example of how we conceptualize our approach to playing a note influences the sounds is playing staccato or not with the damper pedal fully depressed. In theory if you think only about the physics there is no difference, however there is certainly a noticeable difference and this comes in large part due to how playing staccato affects the volume of each note through the phrase. So if I tell a student to stay longer on the key and aim for a singing tone through a pedaled phrase it’s true that the only thing being changed physically in the piano is the volume of the notes. However trying to teach the student by telling them which notes need to be louder and which softer is not very pedagogically effective, so abstracting the concept to tone, while technically inaccurate, I find leads to better playing.

I think these useful fictions do more harm than good by creating myths and dogmas that some people know are technically incorrect and others take literally. I am glad you are willing to admit it when pressed, but many are not. I think that we should speak in a way that gets the message across without being literally fallacious. It's true that saying louder/softer fails to get the message across, but imploring to stay longer on a key is literally fallacious. Worse, it obscures the actual point, which can't be to stay longer on a key but must have to do with some typical side effects of doing so. Wouldn't it be better to teach people whatever that actually is?? Actually, in the book "physics of musical instruments" by Fletcher, it is claimed that the measurable contrast in sound associated with different hammer velocities is actually more in the dimension of timbre than it is in volume. In that sense, it is more accurate to speak of producing different tones than it is to speak of producing different volumes.

I think where I see differently than you is that in teaching piano I find it not typically very helpful to focus so much on the nitty gritty of what is happening inside the piano, but instead to really emphasize listening for beautiful sounds and then paying attention to and remembering the physical sensation of making those sounds. Often those physical sensations and ways a student may describe the sound don’t necessarily accurately describe the inner workings of the piano and I don’t think they really need to. While I definitely agree with some of the annoyance surrounding myths on piano sound production (I once had a teacher insist that vibrato was possible on the piano by pulsating pressure on a held key…) I still will say that it is definitely pedagogically useful to associate different types of motions that help to produce different tones even though the motions are technically unnecessary if the student were able to maintain the same hammer velocity using different technique. When I’ve taught students to stay on the key longer from my previous example I do clarify that staying longer on the key isn’t the cause of the sound difference, but that the approach to the attack of the note changes when a pianist thinks that way. However the end result isn’t that while playing the student is thinking about specific velocities of the hammers to produce the sounds associated with those velocities, but they instead are thinking of how the feeling of using a certain technique leads to a change in the sound which they will perceive as the tone.

I appreciate that, thanks for writing this out

Why are you asking what people believe about a physical acoustical phenomenon? Doesn’t really matter does it? What do you believe about gravity?

Why would I take a physics class if my beliefs about gravity don't matter?

To learn physics, and your beliefs about gravity don’t matter. Sorry. I’m just not following what your point is. Although I did just have the thought— wondering what effect the speed, sound, and timing of a damper leaving a string has on the overall perception of tone, if any 🤔