Google has released an ad for its Android smartphone. If you're a user then perhaps the phone is worth the purchase, but for us Apple-minded folk we can still revel in its new commercial for the device. In it, the mononymous pianist Ji plays a one-tone piano.
Of course a piano cannot be tuned to a single note, which is why the experts at Google had a sort of "piano skeleton" created so that a monotone piano could live up to its namesake. Since each string in a piano is of a different length and width, this contraption required strings of the same length and width to be fastened inside.
Says Dan, the copywriter, of Google's project in the video:
"You listen to music and you listen to a piano and it sounds so beautiful. And that's how it's always sounded but you never realize that it's because every single key is different."
Sure, if you are to undercut an entire lifetime of musicians, maybe the oblivious passerby would fail to realize that each key produces a different tone--or that music in and of itself exists because of this difference in pitch. Therein lies the thesis of this project, I suppose, that while all the keys may look different on the monotone piano, they all produce the same pitch.
Or is it that we're all the same but have different personalities and interests? Well, who knows.
Message aside, the piano is a trip and even when the pianist Ji (Google love's a singular title) taps the first notes he's taken aback and says, "Whoa."
Schubert, Liszt, Mahler, Beethoven, the works of the classical giants abound would not exist if we lived in a monotone world so be thankful that we have difference in pitch, or as Dan the man acknowledged, have different keys we march to.
But enough analyzing, let Google introduce you to the monopiano below and be on the lookout for the commercial next time it's on.
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