Tours

Our first fun tour on Monday was a tour of a piano store and restoration shop. We got to try out the pianos, find out a little more about how digital pianos are made, hear about the history of the building, and see the workshop. Here are some cool things I learned (which you may or may not find interesting):

For a high-end digital piano, what they do is record the sound of multiple pianos on each note, and get a kind of average, which they use to define how the note will sound when played by the digital piano. And they do this for every single variation in sound that the piano has--they have different settings like "Grand Piano," "Concert Grand," "Strings," "Folk," and lot more. For some of the lower end digital pianos, they take the sound for one note, or one octave, and then use the computer to double the frequency and find the sound for all the other octaves. The consequence of this is that you don't hear the different timbre of the highest and lowest notes that you would on a regular piano.

This just made me think about how amazing sound, and light, and the world is! Think about how many pixels a digital camera has to have to produce a good poster print. Then think of how small a negative can be and produce as good of a poster print. And then compare that to sound. It has taken so much to be able to imitate an acoustic piano.

The building itself is all brick, and the inner walls are 3 bricks thick. It wasn't easy to wire the place for electricity. It was also "wired" for gas lighting, and they have working gas lamps. I was surprised at how cleanly they burned.

Down in the workshop, they had pianos taken apart, which they were restringing, revarnishing, and fixing in other ways. They even had this huge organ down there to be fixed up.

Anyway, we had a great time on that tour. Here are David and Wanda in front of the building.

Next, we toured the research labs. My lab is pretty cool, because we have a real helicopter in it. Here's Wanda in the pilot seat.
Here's David showing a section of a particle accelerator. He gets his data from a huge particle accelerator that's more like 4 ft in diameter, and a hundred miles long.David explaining his poster.
Then we went to Battleground and Prophet's Rock. Here are Wanda and David beneath the rock. And on top of it.
Isn't David's had awesome? Wanda bought it for him at the Feast of the Hunter's Moon. It smells good too. At one point he opened the closet and said to me, "Doesn't that smell so good?" I stuck my head in and said it kind of smelled like the pizza we had the night before. I did not successfully detect the smell of leather.

Okay, so this isn't a tour, but I had to put in a picture of the mozzarella sticks that David made for us. They were delicious!