Modular Miniature Piano

Pianos are expensive, heavy, and just loud enough to be distracting to roommates and neighbors but still too quiet to hear in concert without amplification. For churches and productions, long magnetic pickups similar to those used in electric guitars are placed underneath and above all the strings. Let's make the piano strings smaller, down to about a foot long (mean length). A set of strings has a magnetic pickup. Then electronics downshift the frequency and provide hi-fi audio output to headphones or amplifiers. Each modular piano covers four octaves. You can put together two to get a normal size piano, or more to get a church organ, turning the knob to change the frequency of each module as needed.

It's likely that shorter strings will vibrate for a shorter period of time. That's why we seal and pull vacuum on the string chamber. The vacuum sealed chamber is immune to the moisture and temperature changes that otherwise necessitate seasonal re-tuning. The stronger the vacuum, the quieter the instrument becomes. This muting is absolutely necessary because the high-pitched direct audio could sound silly.

How do you play a piano in a vacuum chamber? Use hydraulics to transfer keypresses to the inside of the chamber. The hydraulic links decouple the size of the keys from the spacing of the strings, a boon to the big-fingered and small-handed.

With this mostly-physical setup, you should retain more control over the sound than you would with an electric piano. Or maybe it would sound terrible. But who can say no to a piano that can be played on the beach or in the rain worry-free?