Hello and welcome back to the Curious Kid podcast.

We are so excited about this episode.

The topic we're covering today is one that I've been interested in learning more about for a long time.

This week we are getting curious about pianos. We love music and we love playing

the piano. I've been playing the piano since I was even younger than Olivia is today. And these days,

I'm teaching Olivia how to play some songs on the piano and she really enjoys it. If you look at a piano, you will see keys.

Not the type of keys you use to open the door. Certainly not. The keys on a piano are things you

push to play a note on the piano. There are lots of keys on the piano, 88 of them to be exact. Some of the piano keys are white, and other keys are black.

Olivia, what's the question of the week?

The question of the week is, how many black keys are there on a piano?

While you are thinking about the answer, let's learn a bit about piano history.

The piano was invented around the year 1700.

That's more than 300 years ago.

It was invented by a man named Bartolomeo Cristofori in Italy.

He was trying to make an instrument better than the harpsichord. A harpsichord

was an instrument that already existed at the time. It also happens to look a lot like a piano.

I noticed the word harp was in the word harpsichord. That's a great observation. If you've ever

seen someone play a harp, the person plays it by plucking at the strings

to make beautiful sounds.

When someone plays a harpsichord, the strings are also plucked, but instead of being plucked

by fingers, they are plucked by quills.

No matter how hard or soft you push the key on the harpsichord, the volume always stays the same.

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