I have never heard of a prepared piano until a couple of months ago. It’s one of the many music-related things I have not heard about until I started learning violin and piano alongside my seven year old daughter. It’s ironic, because my main work area is related to acoustics, and some of the most fundamental works in the field deal with theory of musical instruments. So it is quite exciting to come face-to-face with some of the physics that I have only known in theoretical or applied engineering contexts.
Last Saturday, my daughter tried playing a prepared piano for the first time. She has been looking forward to it ever since she heard about wedging coins and pieces of rubber between piano strings from our teacher, who studied it systematically and actually wrote a book about John Cage’s techniques. As you can see in the video, she was delighted at the transformation of the piano into a percussion instrument. “I don’t recognize the sounds!” she cried.
What I personally learn from this is that music in general, and musical education in particular, is more about excitement of discovery and joy of “flow
Another thing I learned is to remember to switch my camera to manual focus when filming in a dimply-lit room. To my excuse, though, the whole prepared piano demonstration was very spontaneous, so I was shooting from the hip, both literally and figuratively speaking.