The piano (Italian pronunciation: [ˈpjaːno]; an abbreviation of pianoforte [pjanoˈfɔrte]) is a musical instrument played using a keyboard. It is widely employed in classical, jazz, traditional and popular music for solo and ensemble performances, accompaniment, and for composing and rehearsal. Although the piano is not portable and often expensive, its versatility and ubiquity have made it one of the world's most familiar musical instruments.
An acoustic piano usually has a protective wooden case surrounding the soundboard and metal strings, and a row of 88 black and white keys (52 white, 36 black). The strings are sounded when the keys are pressed, and silenced when the keys are released. The note can be sustained, even when the keys are released, by the use of pedals.
Pressing a key on the piano's keyboard causes a padded (often with felt) hammer to strike strings. The hammer rebounds, and the strings continue to vibrate at their resonant frequency. These vibrations are transmitted through a bridge to a soundboard that amplifies by more efficiently coupling the acoustic energy to the air. When the key is released, a damper stops the strings' vibration, ending the sound. Although an acoustic piano has strings, it is usually classified as a percussion instrument because the strings are struck rather than plucked (as with a harpsichord or spinet); in the Hornbostel-Sachs system of instrument classification, pianos are considered chordophones. With technological advances, electric, electronic, and digital pianos have also been developed.
Piano, also released as Whisper Not, is an album by jazz pianist Wynton Kelly released on the Riverside label featuring performances by Kelly with Kenny Burrell, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones recorded in 1958.
The Allmusic review by Scott Yanow states "Kelly became a major influence on pianists of the 1960s and 1970s and one can hear the genesis of many other players in these swinging performances".
A piano is a keyboard music instrument.
Piano may also refer to:
The Loop or Darss Canal (Darßer Kanal) was an inlet of the sea between the lagoon known as the Saaler Bodden and the Baltic Sea near Ahrenshoop on the German coast. It formed the northern boundary of the region of Fischland. Originally the Loop was the northern estuarine branch of the River Recknitz.
The old inlet ran between the present villages of Ahrenshoop and Althagen. The Loop was roughly two metres deep and had posts for mooring boats and barges. Its navigability was frequently curtailed by storms and silting up. Today only a small ditch remains on the former Mecklenburg-Pomeranian border, which runs alongside a main road, the so-called Grenzweg ("border way").
The cartographer and court astronomer at the Mecklenburg court, Tilemann Stella, described the Loop thus: "Between the village of Oldenhagen [Althagen] and the Arnshope [Ahrenshoop], the waters of the Ribnitz river and lake break through into the salty sea. Beyond the beach is a large pile of rock and bricks at the place by the beach; that was the customs post, located 3 or 4 ruthen [50 metres] into the salty sea. Beyond that, forty or fifty posts stood in the salt sea, at the end of which was a large pile of rocks on which the fort stood."
A turn is an element of secondary structure in proteins where the polypeptide chain reverses its overall direction. For beta turns go to Beta turn.
According to one definition, a turn is a structural motif where the Cα atoms of two residues separated by few (usually 1 to 5) peptide bonds are close (< 7 Å), while the residues do not form a secondary structure element such as an alpha helix or beta sheet with regularly repeating backbone dihedral angles. Although the proximity of the terminal Cα atoms usually correlates with formation of a hydrogen bond between the corresponding residues, a hydrogen bond is not a requirement in this turn definition. That said, in many cases the H-bonding and Cα-distance definitions are equivalent.
Turns are classified according to the separation between the two end residues: