The toy piano goes to college

In 1948, experimental American composer John Cage, featured the toy piano as the central musical instrument in his Suite for Toy Piano. Last November, David Claman, an assistant professor at Massachusetts' College of Holy Cross, began a project called the "Extensible Toy Piano Festival." Part of the project was to digitally sample the sounds of the toy piano and post them on the college website to make them available to musicians and composers for experimentation and entry into the festival's composition competition. While the mechanism of a toy piano has a simple mechanism of hammers hitting steel rods instead of strings, some toy pianos, such as the Schoenhut toy piano, are tuned very well across their three-octave range. Toy pianos may be a child's toy, but many a serious musician started on one.

- The Creativity Institute