Piano

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 (disambiguation)

A piano is a keyboard music instrument.

Piano may also refer to:

Piano: The Melody of a Young Girl's Heart

Piano: The Melody of a Young Girl's Heart (ピアノ Piano, stylized as PIANO) is an anime series, which aired from November 11, 2002 to January 13, 2003, and ran for 10 episodes. Three volumes were released on DVD by Right Stuf under their Nozomi Entertainment label in the North America as well as a complete collection in one collectors edition package, with their English dub being produced by NYAV Post. Centering on Miu Nomura (野村 美雨 Nomura Miu), the story follows her as she struggles to rediscover the joy in music and playing piano she once knew as a child. Character designs were done by Kōsuke Fujishima who came up with the concept and idea for the show.

Plot summary

Miu Nomura always played the piano and found it to be one of the greatest joys in her life. Even when she was a little girl the music she played on her piano made her heart soar, a feeling she desired to share with anyone who would listen, as she eagerly shared her talent on with the piano to those around her. As time passed, she became an introverted teenager far too shy to express her feelings and even unable to do it through her music anymore. It has gotten so bad that her playing has suffered greatly and her piano teacher has grown impatient with Miu's continual failure to live up to the expectations he knows she is capable of reaching if she could just try a little harder.

Head (watercraft)

The head (or heads) is a ship's toilet. The name derives from sailing ships in which the toilet area for the regular sailors was placed at the head or bow of the ship.

Design

In sailing ships, the toilet was placed in the bow for two reasons. Firstly, since most vessels of the era could not sail directly into the wind, the winds came mostly across the rear of the ship, placing the head essentially downwind. Secondly, if placed somewhat above the water line, vents or slots cut near the floor level would allow normal wave action to wash out the facility. Only the captain had a private toilet near his quarters, at the stern of the ship in the quarter gallery.

In many modern boats, the heads look similar to seated flush toilets but use a system of valves and pumps that brings sea water into the toilet and pumps the waste out through the hull in place of the more normal cistern and plumbing trap to a drain. In small boats the pump is often hand operated. The cleaning mechanism is easily blocked if too much toilet paper or other fibrous material is put down the pan.

News style

News style, journalistic style or news writing style is the prose style used for news reporting in media such as newspapers, radio and television.

News style encompasses not only vocabulary and sentence structure, but also the way in which stories present the information in terms of relative importance, tone, and intended audience. The tense used for news style articles is past tense.

News writing attempts to answer all the basic questions about any particular event—who, what, when, where and why (the Five Ws) and also often how—at the opening of the article. This form of structure is sometimes called the "inverted pyramid", to refer to the decreasing importance of information in subsequent paragraphs.

News stories also contain at least one of the following important characteristics relative to the intended audience: proximity, prominence, timeliness, human interest, oddity, or consequence.

The related term journalese is sometimes used, usually pejoratively, to refer to news-style writing. Another is headlinese.

Head (Julian Cope song)

"Head" is a song by the English singer-songwriter Julian Cope. It is the third and final single released in support of his album Peggy Suicide.

Chart positions

References