That's really cool. Surprisingly, I don't think I've ever seen a grand piano on the Great Wall of China before.

I'm so tired of these hordes of Asians bringing their grand piano to the library and setting up like it's a damn concert hall.

Is it wrong of me to think of Drowning Mona?

I don't know if anyone makes that style player piano these days. Yamaha makes their Disklavier pianos. But I think if I was to invest into a nice grand piano, I would want to get a Bösendorfer CEUS system... heck just a Bösendorfer itself would be grand... Although in the CEUS system at least, I think somebody actually needs to sit down and play it first for it to be recorded.

>> ^MilkmanDan:

I want to see this on one of those player pianos with the holes-in-paper feeding...
Edit: Then again, there might be more hole than paper there near the finale.

The tones played by pressing the keyboard sound pretty woody for a grand piano... they must have really tortured it.

Didn't they show at the very beginning the piece of cardboard holding down the strings? Unless I am mistaken -- I don't care enough to go back and look again. I'll just let you guys beat up on me instead.

>>Crake
The tones played by pressing the keyboard sound pretty woody for a grand piano... they must have really tortured it.

Nah, they probably just muffled the strings with some felt.

The tones played by pressing the keyboard sound pretty woody for a grand piano... they must have really tortured it.

woody... goooooorn.

obviously not operated by a hammer mechanism.
it had a cord coming out of it, so it is just a tiny keyboard on a model of a grand piano.

Ugh. I upvoted before I remembered I don't care if someone makes the world's smallest grand piano.

Pretty amazing piece of technology, and I know lots of people who would really appreciate something like this. To this day the downfall of every digital piano has been that it never sounds real, because the sound is "played", not "generated" like in a piano. No matter how many samples you put in your software, it'll never have the feel and sound. Of course emulating the process isn't a perfect solution and will still be lacking in many ways (so Steinway & Sons can sleep easy), but it will still give people, for whom the purchase of a real piano (and lets not even mention a grand piano) is either completely impossible or at the very least totally unpractical, better sound and feel for the instrument with the added bonus of major workability with the sound. It's even reasonably priced, what's not to like?

No more buttered scones for me I'm off to play the grand piano!

Un Chien Andalou (1928) Directed by Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel

From wikipedia:
The film opens with a scene in which a woman's eye is slit by a razor (the man with the razor is played by Buñuel himself), and continues with a series of surreal scenes

"American film critic Roger Ebert called Un chien andalou "the most famous short film ever made, and anyone halfway interested in the cinema sees it sooner or later, usually several times."[1]

Critics have suggested that Un chien andalou can be understood as a typically Buñuelian anti-bourgeois, anticlerical piece. The man dragging a piano, donkey and priests has been interpreted as an allegory of man's progress towards his goal being hindered by the baggage of society's conventions that he is forced to bear. Likewise, the image of an eyeball being sliced by a razor can be understood as Buñuel "attacking" the film's viewers. Also, Federico García Lorca viewed this film as a personal attack on him."

other images to look for!
* an androgynous woman pokes at a severed hand in the street with her cane
* a man drags two grand pianos containing dead and rotting donkeys, the tablets of the Ten Commandments, and two live priests (Dalí plays one of the priests in this scene)
* a man's hand has a hole in the palm from which ants emerge. The French phrase "ants in the palms," (which means that someone is "itching" to kill) is shown literally.
* a woman's armpit hair attaches itself to a man's face.