How a Piano Works

Do you know How a Piano Works?  You can find the answer here. The picture above displays body inside a piano. Everything starts when you press a key. When you press a key down, a device called a jack pushes the hammer towards a string. The hammer strikes the string, causing it to vibrate, and falls back immediately. (If the hammer didn't fall back, the sound produced would not be a clear tone but rather a “clonk”!) As the force with which you press a key determines how hard the hammer will strike, you can achieve a wide range in volume simply with how hard or softly you press a key.



When you release the key, a damper stops the vibrations in the string in the same way that you could stop a wire from vibrating by pressing down on it. This set of hammers, levers, and dampers compose a piano’s action. At that point, the bridge carries the vibrations to the soundboard. The soundboard is responsible for the amplification of sound.


In fact, pressing a key causes 35 inter-linked actions to take place, resulting in the sound of a particular note!


Now you know about how a piano works. For next post, I'll show about piano pedals.