Neurosis (band)
Neurosis is an American avant-garde metal band from Oakland, California. It was formed in 1985 by guitarist Scott Kelly, bassist Dave Edwardson, drummer Jason Roeder as a hardcore punk band. Chad Salter joined as a second guitarist and appeared on the band's 1987 debut Pain of Mind before being replaced by Steve Von Till in 1989; the following year, the lineup further expanded to include a visual artist. Beginning with their third album Souls at Zero, Neurosis developed a unique musical style crucial to the emergence of the post-metal and sludge metal genres; the band's lineup stabilized in 1995 with the addition of Noah Landis, who replaced Simon McIlroy on keyboards and electronics. That same year they formed the experimental music group Tribes of Neurot and in 1999 the record label Neurot Recordings; as of 2018, they have released 12 studio albums, including a 2003 collaboration with Jarboe, garnered critical recognition. The BBC credited them with taking "heavy music to unimaginable spaces... metal's definitive response to the 21st century."
In late 1985, Scott Kelly, Dave Edwardson, Jason Roeder members of Violent Coercion, founded Neurosis as a hardcore punk outfit, inspired by British crust punk in the vein of Amebix and Crass. In 1986 Chad Salter was added on second guitar, in 1990, Simon McIlroy joined the band as a synthesizer/sampler. There have only been a few changes in the lineup of Neurosis' musicians since band's inception. In 1989 guitarist/vocalist Chad Salter was replaced by Steve Von Till, in 1995 Noah Landis, a childhood friend of Dave Edwardson, replaced Simon McIlroy as keyboardist. With The Word as Law, Neurosis began to transition from the hardcore punk of Pain of Mind to the more experimental sound of Souls at Zero, which would form the basis for post-metal and atmospheric sludge metal. Neurosis' signature sound came into full force with Enemy of the Sun, with The Quietus observing that "at the time few could have predicted this black hole of agonizingly precise metal riffs, unnerving backmasking, industrial folkisms and extensive sampling".
In 1996, Neurosis attracted mainstream attention with its Relapse Records debut, Through Silver in Blood and subsequent tour with Pantera. In 1999, Neurosis released Times of Grace, designed to be played synchronously with Grace, an album released by Neurosis' ambient side project, Tribes of Neurot. In the early 2000s, the band founded their own independent record label, Neurot Recordings, which, in addition to releasing material from Neurosis and its associated projects, signed several other artists. Beginning with A Sun That Never Sets, Neurosis began incorporating clean vocals and acoustic instrumentation with a growing folk music influence, more noted presence of classical string instruments as well as slower tempos and a more contemplative sound. Allmusic described this change as an "aesthetic sea change". 2004's The Eye of Every Storm expanded upon this change by incorporating more ambient textures into the mix and presenting a softer post-rock oriented sound. The band released their ninth studio album Given to the Rising on May 8, 2007 through Neurot Records.
On this album Neurosis re-incorporated a more aggressive approach into their music once again, the album was well received by critics. The band entered the studio in December 2011 to record the follow-up to Given to the Rising; the new album, entitled Honor Found in Decay, was released in late October 2012. The band performed at Roadburn 2016, with Brooklyn Vegan's Ian Cory writing that "once the house lights came up it was hard to justify watching anything else." This was part of their series of shows performed in celebration of their 30th anniversary as a band. On May 5, 2016 relapse Records confirmed they were reissuing A Sun That Never Sets and The Eye of Every Storm on vinyl on June 17 with new artwork, their eleventh studio album, titled Fires Within Fires, was released on September 23, 2016. From 1990 to 1993, Adam G. Kendall was recruited to perform live with the band. Following his departure from touring, Pete Inc. took over the job, although Kendall continued to contribute visuals for the band until as late as 1997.
Kendall shot the footage for the "Locust Star" video. Josh Graham took over live visuals in early 2000 as Pete wasn't "cutting the mustard", created album artwork for 2004's The Eye of Every Storm, 2007's Given to the Rising, 2012's Honor Found in Decay, as well as re-designs for the reissues of Souls at Zero and Enemy of the Sun. Graham and Neurosis amicably parted ways in late November 2012 via an announcement on the band website, he was not replaced and the band ceased to use live visual media. Experimental and psychedelic in nature, Neurosis' visual media have added to the reputation of their live performances. Many of the visuals for their tours supporting Through Silver in Blood are taken from Ken Russell's film Altered States. Other images are included in the enhanced portion of the Sovereign E. P, on the A Sun That Never Sets DVD video release; the majority of the DVD release was directed with an additional video by Chad Rullman. Neurosis emerged as a hardcore punk band, performing a blend of hardcore and heavy metal inspired by British punk and described as crust punk or crossover.
However their second album The Word as Law introduced some elements of avant-garde music and sludge metal, a genre, emerging as a fusion of hardcore and doom metal. Thereafter, the band developed a unique sound.
Noise music
Noise music is a category of music, characterised by the expressive use of noise within a musical context. This type of music tends to challenge the distinction, made in conventional musical practices between musical and non-musical sound. Noise music includes a wide range of musical styles and sound-based creative practices that feature noise as a primary aspect; some of the music can feature acoustically or electronically generated noise, both traditional and unconventional musical instruments. It may incorporate live machine sounds, non-musical vocal techniques, physically manipulated audio media, processed sound recordings, field recording, computer-generated noise, stochastic process, other randomly produced electronic signals such as distortion, static and hum. There may be emphasis on high volume levels and lengthy, continuous pieces. More noise music may contain aspects such as improvisation, extended technique and indeterminacy. In many instances, conventional use of melody, rhythm or pulse is dispensed with.
The Futurist art movement was important for the development of the noise aesthetic, as was the Dada art movement, the Surrealist and Fluxus art movements the Fluxus artists Joe Jones, Yasunao Tone, George Brecht, Robert Watts, Wolf Vostell, Dieter Roth, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Walter De Maria's Ocean Music, Milan Knížák's Broken Music Composition, early LaMonte Young and Takehisa Kosugi. Contemporary noise music is associated with extreme volume and distortion. In the domain of experimental rock, examples include Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, Sonic Youth. Other examples of music that contain noise-based features include works by Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Helmut Lachenmann, Cornelius Cardew, Theatre of Eternal Music, Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Ryoji Ikeda, Survival Research Laboratories, Ramleh, Brighter Death Now, Dror Feiler, Cabaret Voltaire, Psychic TV, Jean Tinguely's recordings of his sound sculpture, the music of Hermann Nitsch's Orgien Mysterien Theater, La Monte Young's bowed gong works from the late 1960s.
Genres such as industrial, industrial techno, lo-fi music, black metal, sludge metal, glitch music employ noise-based materials. According to Danish noise and music theorist Torben Sangild, one single definition of noise in music is not possible. Sangild instead provides three basic definitions of noise: a musical acoustics definition, a second communicative definition based on distortion or disturbance of a communicative signal, a third definition based in subjectivity. According to Murray Schafer there are four types of noise: unwanted noise, unmusical sound, any loud sound, a disturbance in any signaling system. Definitions regarding what is considered noise, relative to music, have changed over time. Ben Watson, in his article Noise as Permanent Revolution, points out that Ludwig van Beethoven's Grosse Fuge "sounded like noise" to his audience at the time. Indeed, Beethoven's publishers persuaded him to remove it from its original setting as the last movement of a string quartet, he did so.
They subsequently published it separately. In attempting to define noise music and its value, Paul Hegarty cites the work of noted cultural critics Jean Baudrillard, Georges Bataille and Theodor Adorno and through their work traces the history of "noise", he defines noise at different times as "intrusive, unwanted", "lacking skill, not being appropriate" and "a threatening emptiness". He traces these trends starting with 18th-century concert hall music. Hegarty contends that it is John Cage's composition 4'33", in which an audience sits through four and a half minutes of "silence", that represents the beginning of noise music proper. For Hegarty, "noise music", as with 4'33", is that music made up of incidental sounds that represent the tension between "desirable" sound and undesirable "noise" that make up all noise music from Erik Satie to NON to Glenn Branca. Writing about Japanese noise music, Hegarty suggests that "it is not a genre, but it is a genre, multiple, characterized by this multiplicity...
Japanese noise music can come in all styles, referring to all other genres... but crucially asks the question of genre—what does it mean to be categorized, definable?". Writer Douglas Kahn, in his work Noise, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, discusses the use of noise as a medium and explores the ideas of Antonin Artaud, George Brecht, William Burroughs, Sergei Eisenstein, Allan Kaprow, Michael McClure, Yoko Ono, Jackson Pollock, Luigi Russolo, Dziga Vertov. In Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali explores the relationship between noise music and the future of society, he indicates that noise in music is a predictor of social change and demonstrates how noise acts as the subconscious of society—validating and testing new social and political realities. Like much of modern and contemporary art, noise music takes characteristics of the perceived negative traits of noise mentioned below and uses them in aesthetic and imaginative ways. In common use, the word noise means noise pollution.
In electronics noise can refer to the electronic signal corresponding to acoustic noise or the electronic signal corresponding to the noise seen as'snow' on a degraded television or video i
Blues
Blues is a music genre and musical form, originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1870s by African Americans from roots in African musical traditions, African-American work songs and the folk music of white Americans of European heritage. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and rhymed simple narrative ballads; the blues form, ubiquitous in jazz and blues and rock and roll, is characterized by the call-and-response pattern, the blues scale and specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. Blue notes thirds or fifths flattened in pitch, are an essential part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove. Blues as a genre is characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, instrumentation. Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times, it was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current structure became standard: the AAB pattern, consisting of a line sung over the four first bars, its repetition over the next four, a longer concluding line over the last bars.
Early blues took the form of a loose narrative relating the racial discrimination and other challenges experienced by African-Americans. Many elements, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be traced back to the music of Africa; the origins of the blues are closely related to the religious music of the Afro-American community, the spirituals. The first appearance of the blues is dated to after the ending of slavery and the development of juke joints, it is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the former slaves. Chroniclers began to report about blues music at the dawn of the 20th century; the first publication of blues sheet music was in 1908. Blues has since evolved from unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves into a wide variety of styles and subgenres. Blues subgenres include country blues, such as Delta blues and Piedmont blues, as well as urban blues styles such as Chicago blues and West Coast blues. World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience white listeners.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a hybrid form called blues rock developed, which blended blues styles with rock music. The term Blues may have come from "blue devils", meaning sadness; the phrase blue devils may have been derived from Britain in the 1600s, when the term referred to the "intense visual hallucinations that can accompany severe alcohol withdrawal". As time went on, the phrase lost the reference to devils, "it came to mean a state of agitation or depression." By the 1800s in the United States, the term blues was associated with drinking alcohol, a meaning which survives in the phrase blue law, which prohibits the sale of alcohol on Sunday. Though the use of the phrase in African-American music may be older, it has been attested to in print since 1912, when Hart Wand's "Dallas Blues" became the first copyrighted blues composition. In lyrics the phrase is used to describe a depressed mood, it is in this sense of a sad state of mind that one of the earliest recorded references to "the blues" was written by Charlotte Forten aged 25, in her diary on December 14, 1862.
She was a free-born black from Pennsylvania, working as a schoolteacher in South Carolina, instructing both slaves and freedmen, wrote that she "came home with the blues" because she felt lonesome and pitied herself. She overcame her depression and noted a number of songs, such as Poor Rosy, that were popular among the slaves. Although she admitted being unable to describe the manner of singing she heard, Forten wrote that the songs "can't be sung without a full heart and a troubled spirit", conditions that have inspired countless blues songs; the lyrics of early traditional blues verses often consisted of a single line repeated four times. It was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current structure became standard: the so-called "AAB" pattern, consisting of a line sung over the four first bars, its repetition over the next four, a longer concluding line over the last bars. Two of the first published blues songs, "Dallas Blues" and "Saint Louis Blues", were 12-bar blues with the AAB lyric structure.
W. C. Handy wrote; the lines are sung following a pattern closer to rhythmic talk than to a melody. Early blues took the form of a loose narrative. African-American singers voiced his or her "personal woes in a world of harsh reality: a lost love, the cruelty of police officers, oppression at the hands of white folk, hard times"; this melancholy has led to the suggestion of an Igbo origin for blues because of the reputation the Igbo had throughout plantations in the Americas for their melancholic music and outlook on life when they were enslaved. The lyrics relate troubles experienced within African American society. For instance Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Rising High Water Blues" tells of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927: "Backwater rising, Southern peoples can't make no time I said, backwater rising, Southern peoples can't make no time And I can't get no hearing from that Memphis girl of mine."Although the blues gained an association with misery and oppression, the lyrics could be humorous and raunchy: "Rebecca, get your big legs off of me, Rebecca, get your big legs off of m
Percussion instrument
A percussion instrument is a musical instrument, sounded by being struck or scraped by a beater. The percussion family is believed to include the oldest musical instruments, following the human voice; the percussion section of an orchestra most contains instruments such as timpani, snare drum, bass drum, cymbals and tambourine. However, the section can contain non-percussive instruments, such as whistles and sirens, or a blown conch shell. Percussive techniques can be applied to the human body, as in body percussion. On the other hand, keyboard instruments, such as the celesta, are not part of the percussion section, but keyboard percussion instruments such as the glockenspiel and xylophone are included. Percussion instruments are most divided into two classes: Pitched percussion instruments, which produce notes with an identifiable pitch, unpitched percussion instruments, which produce notes or sounds without an identifiable pitch. Percussion instruments may play not only rhythm, but melody and harmony.
Percussion is referred to as "the backbone" or "the heartbeat" of a musical ensemble working in close collaboration with bass instruments, when present. In jazz and other popular music ensembles, the pianist, bassist and sometimes the guitarist are referred to as the rhythm section. Most classical pieces written for full orchestra since the time of Haydn and Mozart are orchestrated to place emphasis on the strings and brass; however at least one pair of timpani is included, though they play continuously. Rather, they serve to provide additional accents. In the 18th and 19th centuries, other percussion instruments have been used, again sparingly; the use of percussion instruments became more frequent in the 20th century classical music. In every style of music, percussion plays a pivotal role. In military marching bands and pipes and drums, it is the beat of the bass drum that keeps the soldiers in step and at a regular speed, it is the snare that provides that crisp, decisive air to the tune of a regiment.
In classic jazz, one immediately thinks of the distinctive rhythm of the hi-hats or the ride cymbal when the word "swing" is spoken. In more recent popular music culture, it is impossible to name three or four rock, hip-hop, funk or soul charts or songs that do not have some sort of percussive beat keeping the tune in time; because of the diversity of percussive instruments, it is not uncommon to find large musical ensembles composed of percussion. Rhythm and harmony are all represented in these ensembles. Music for pitched percussion instruments can be notated on a staff with the same treble and bass clefs used by many non-percussive instruments. Music for percussive instruments without a definite pitch can be notated with a specialist rhythm or percussion-clef. Percussion instruments are classified by various criteria sometimes depending on their construction, ethnic origin, function within musical theory and orchestration, or their relative prevalence in common knowledge; the word "percussion" derives from Latin the terms: "percussio", "percussus".
As a noun in contemporary English, Wiktionary describes it as "the collision of two bodies to produce a sound." The term has application in medicine and weaponry, as in percussion cap. However, all known uses of percussion appear to share a similar lineage beginning with the original Latin: "percussus". In a musical context the percussion instruments may have been coined to describe a family of musical instruments including drums, metal plates, or blocks that musicians beat or struck to produce sound. Hornbostel–Sachs has no high-level section for percussion. Most percussion instruments are classified as membranophones; however the term percussion is instead used at lower-levels of the Hornbostel–Sachs hierarchy, including to identify instruments struck with either a non-sonorous object or against a non-sonorous object. This is opposed to concussion, which refers to instruments with two or more complementary sonorous parts that strike against each other and other meanings. For example: 111.1 Concussion idiophones or clappers, played in pairs and beaten against each other, such as zills and clapsticks.
111.2 Percussion idiophones, includes many percussion instruments played with the hand or by a percussion mallet, such as the hang and the xylophone, but not drums and only some cymbals. 21 Struck drums, includes most types of drum, such as the timpani, snare drum, tom-tom. (Included in most drum sets or 412.12 Percussion reeds, a class of wind instrument unrelated to percussion in the more common sense There are many instruments that have some claim to being percussion, but are classified otherwise: Keyboard instruments such as the celesta and piano. Stringed instruments played with beaters such as the hammered dulcimer. Unpitched whistles and similar instruments, such as the pea whistle and Acme siren. Percussion instruments are sometimes classified as "pitched" or "unpitched". While valid, this classification is seen as inadequate. Rather, it may be more informative to describe percussion instruments in regards to one or more of the following four paradigms: Many texts, including Teaching Percussion by Gary Cook of the University of Arizona, begin by studying the physica
Simon Reynolds
Simon Reynolds is an English music journalist and author who began his professional career on the staff of Melody Maker in the mid-1980s, has since gone on to freelance and publish a number of full-length books on music and popular culture, ranging from historical tomes on rave music, glam rock, the post-punk era to critical works such as The Sex Revolts: Gender and Rock'n' Roll and Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past. He has contributed to Spin, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Guardian, The Wire and others. Reynolds grew up in Berkhamsted. Inspired by his younger brother Tim, he became interested in rock and punk in 1978. In the early Eighties, he attended Brasenose Collage at the University of Oxford. After graduating, in 1984 he co-founded the Oxford-based music journal Monitor with his friends and future Melody Maker colleagues Paul Oldfield and David Stubbs along with Hilary Little and Chris Scott. In 1986, Reynolds joined the staff of Melody Maker, where his writing was marked by enthusiasm for a wave of neo-psychedelic rock and hip hop artists that emerged in the mid-1980s.
During this period and his Melody Maker colleagues set themselves in opposition to what they characterized as the conservative humanism of the era's indie rock and pop music, as well as the unadventurous style and approach of most music criticism. Pieces from this late Eighties era would form the remixed collection Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock, published in 1990. In 1990, Reynolds left the staff of Melody Maker and became a freelance writer, splitting his time between London and New York. In the early 1990s, he became involved in rave culture and the electronic dance music scene that of the UK, became a writer on the development of what he would conceptualise as the "hardcore continuum" along with its surrounding culture such as pirate radio. During this time, he theorized the concept of "post-rock", using the term first in a Melody Maker 1993 feature about Insides and in a more developed form in a May 1994 thinkpiece for The Wire and in a review of Bark Psychosis' album Hex, published in the March 1994 issue of Mojo magazine.
In late 1994, Reynolds moved to the East Village in Manhattan. In 1995, with his wife, Joy Press, Reynolds co-authored The Sex Revolts: Gender and Rock'n' Roll, a critical analysis of gender in rock. In 1998, Reynolds published Energy Flash: a Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture, a history of house music and rave genres like jungle music and gabber; the book was published that same year in America in abridged form, with the title Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture. In 1998 Reynolds became a senior editor at Spin magazine in the US. In 1999, he returned to freelance work. In 2005, Reynolds released Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984, a history of the post-punk era. In 2007, Reynolds published Bring the Noise: 20 Years of Writing about Hip Rock and Hip Hop in the UK, a collection of his writing themed around the relationship between white bohemian rock and black street music. In 2008, an updated edition of Energy Flash was published, with new chapters on the decade of dance music following the appearance of the first edition.
In 2009, a companion volume to Rip It Up and Start Again was published, Totally Wired: Postpunk Interviews and Overviews, containing interview transcripts and new essays. In 2011, Reynolds published Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past, a critical investigation into what he perceives as the current situation of chronic retrogression in pop music, with a focus on the effects of the internet and digital culture on music consumption and musical creativity. In 2013, a second expanded update of Energy Flash was published, with new material on the rise of dubstep to worldwide popularity and the EDM or Electronic Dance Music explosion in America. Reynolds's eighth book, a history of the glam rock era and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, was published in October 2016. In addition to writing books, Reynolds has continued freelancing for magazines, giving lectures, appearing in music documentaries, he operates a blog, Blissblog along with various satellite blogs such as the book-focused outlets Energy Flash and Shock and Awe, the drivel blog Hardly Baked.
Reynolds maintains an archive for his writing, the blog ReynoldsRetro. He resides in Los Angeles. Reynolds' writing has blended cultural criticism with music journalism, he has written extensively on gender, class and sexuality in relation to music and culture. Early in his career, Reynolds made use of critical theory and philosophy in his analysis of music, deriving particular influence from thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, he has on occasion used the Marxist concepts of commodity fetishism and false consciousness to describe attitudes prevalent in hip hop music. In discussing the relationship between class and music, Reynolds coined the term liminal class, defined as the upper-working class and lower-middle-class, a group he credits with "a lot of music energy". Reynolds has written about drug culture and its relationship to various musical developments and movements. In the 2000s, in tandem with fellow critic and blogger Mark Fisher, Reynolds made use of Jacques Derrida's concept of hauntology to describe a strain of music and popular art preoccupied with the disjointed temporality
Let Me Be a Woman (album)
Let Me Be a Woman is the third album by Oxbow, recorded in 1993 and first released in 1995 through Brinkman Records. All tracks written by Oxbow. OxbowDan Adams – bass guitar Tom Dobrov – drums, percussion Eugene S. Robinson – vocals Niko Wenner – guitars, Hammond organ, recordingAdditional personnelSteve Albini – recording Kathy Acker – spoken word Claudia Herzog – violin Jorjee – vocals Sanxe Lovxa – vocals Jon Raskin – saxophone Alicia J. Rose – accordion Cintra Wilson – piano Roderick Wyllie – reed organ Jim Blanchard – artwork Britta Höper – artwork, design Let Me Be A Woman at Discogs
Keyboard instrument
A keyboard instrument is a musical instrument played using a keyboard, a row of levers which are pressed by the fingers. The most common of these are the piano and various electronic keyboards, including synthesizers and digital pianos. Other keyboard instruments include celestas, which are struck idiophones operated by a keyboard, carillons, which are housed in bell towers or belfries of churches or municipal buildings. Today, the term keyboard refers to keyboard-style synthesizers. Under the fingers of a sensitive performer, the keyboard may be used to control dynamics, shading and other elements of expression—depending on the design and inherent capabilities of the instrument. Another important use of the word keyboard is in historical musicology, where it means an instrument whose identity cannot be established. In the 18th century, the harpsichord, the clavichord, the early piano were in competition, the same piece might be played on more than one. Hence, in a phrase such as "Mozart excelled as a keyboard player," the word keyboard is all-inclusive.
The earliest known keyboard instrument was the Ancient Greek hydraulis, a type of pipe organ, invented in the third century BC. The keys were balanced and could be played with a light touch, as is clear from the reference in a Latin poem by Claudian, who says magna levi detrudens murmura tactu... intent, “let him thunder forth as he presses out mighty roarings with a light touch”. From its invention until the fourteenth century, the organ remained the only keyboard instrument; the organ did not feature a keyboard at all, but rather buttons or large levers operated by a whole hand. Every keyboard until the fifteenth century had seven naturals to each octave; the clavichord and the harpsichord appeared during the fourteenth century—the clavichord being earlier. The harpsichord and clavichord were both common until widespread adoption of the piano in the eighteenth century, after which their popularity decreased; the piano was revolutionary because a pianist could vary the volume of the sound by varying the vigor with which each key was struck.
The piano's full name is gravicèmbalo con piano e forte meaning harpsichord with soft and loud but can be shortened to piano-forte, which means soft-loud in Italian. In its current form, the piano is a product of the late nineteenth century, is far removed in both sound and appearance from the "pianos" known to Mozart and Beethoven. In fact, the modern piano is different from the 19th-century pianos used by Liszt and Brahms. See Piano history and musical performance. Keyboard instruments were further developed in the early twentieth century. Early electromechanical instruments, such as the Ondes Martenot, appeared early in the century; this was a important contribution to the keyboard's history. Much effort has gone into creating an instrument that sounds like the piano but lacks its size and weight; the electric piano and electronic piano were early efforts that, while useful instruments in their own right, did not convincingly reproduce the timbre of the piano. Electric and electronic organs were developed during the same period.
More recent electronic keyboard designs strive to emulate the sound of specific make and model pianos using digital samples and computer models. Each acoustic keyboard contains 88 keys. Weighted keys, found on electronic keyboards, are designed to simulate the resistance of a key on an acoustic keyboard, via pressurization. There are 4 types of weighted keys. Keybeds, or non-weighted keys place the weights within the base of the keyboard; the second type, Semi-weighted uses springs, the third type is hammer keys. Most electronic keyboards use the fourth type: graded simulate keys. Weighted keys are made of wood, or metal/wood substitute. Enharmonic keyboard Musical instrument Orchestrina di camera Piano Symphony Young, Percy M. Keyboard Musicians of the World. London: Abelard-Schuman, 1967. N. B.: Concerns celebrated keyboard players and the various such instruments used over the centuries. ISBN 0-200-71497-X The general keyboard in the age of MIDI Renaissance Keyboards on the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Pianofortes of Bartolomeo Cristofori on the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
