The piano is one of the most-popular musical instruments in the world. But peek inside it, and you’ll quickly discover that it is also among the more-complex instruments. You might also begin to wonder what type of instrument it is—percussion or stringed?
Inside a piano, there are strings, and there is a long row of uniformly rounded felt-covered hammers. In the traditional Hornbostel-Sachs system of categorizing musical instruments, the piano is considered a type of chordophone. Similar to a lyre or a harp, it has strings stretched between two points. When the strings vibrate, they produce sound. On a piano, however, those vibrations are initiated by hammers hitting the strings rather than by plucking or by moving a bow across them. So, the piano also falls into the realm of percussion instruments. As a result, today the piano is generally considered to be both a stringed and a percussion instrument.
Each of the 88 keys of a piano is attached to a hammer that strikes a string of varying length and thickness, with both dimensions of the string becoming smaller in size as the player goes from left to right across the instrument (most apparent in a grand piano). When a key is pressed, it sends its associated hammer into motion, accelerating it toward the string. If the string that is hit is long and thick, the pitch of the sound produced is relatively low; the key, in other words, was on the left end of the piano. If the string that is hit is thin and short, the pitch is higher, indicating that the key played was on the right half of the piano. After striking the string, the hammer rebounds and returns to its original position, ready for the next attack.