Every pianist would love to have a dedicated piano room. Not every pianist is fortunate enough to have one, though, but if you’re one of the lucky ones who is in the process of designating a suitable room in your house as a piano room or you already have one and are looking to design it in a style that your piano deserves, the following five design tips will help you to achieve that worthy goal.
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| Dazzling Piano Room |
Room size and Piano Size
The room has to be large enough to accommodate you and your piano comfortably, and if you’re accomplished enough to give piano recitals, it needs to be large enough to accommodate invited guests without it feeling overcrowded with an audience of just two or three. If you have yet to buy a piano, then the room size has to be taken into account so that you don’t buy one that is too large. A grand piano in a small room just won’t work, so scale down accordingly.
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| Piano Size |
Make your Room Comfortable
The main activities that will take place in your piano room are practice, performance, and, possibly, teaching. Whether you’re an accomplished professional pianist or an enthusiastic piano student, you’ll want to spend a lot of time in your room practising. As you probably already know, nothing shortens extended practice sessions more than a room that is uncomfortably cold, hot or humid. That holds equally true for any recitals you want to give to invited guests or lessons to students if you’re a piano teacher. Make your piano room thermostatically controlled to ensure a comfortable and stable temperature and keep it well ventilated to reduce humidity, which not only makes the room feel stuffy but can also have an adverse effect on your walls, furnishings and even on your piano. In addition, provide comfortable seating for guests.
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| Piano Room |
Reduce Excessive Reverberation
Obviously, you want the best sound you can get, but that doesn’t mean buying the most expensive piano available; it means letting the room modify the sound for the best listening experience. Reverberation, commonly called reverb, is an effect caused by the sound bouncing off the walls and ceiling resulting in multiple echoes so close together that they blend into each other. It’s a pleasing effect in moderation, but if the room is too large, the individual echoes are spaced further apart in time, producing a confused and muddy effect. Similarly, if the walls are bare and hard, the echoes may be too strong. To reduce excessive reverb, wallpaper and soft fabric furnishings and cushions help a lot as they partially absorb the sound and reduce echoes.
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| Piano |
Avoiding Rattles and Buzzes
Resonance is an important acoustic quality that has been carefully incorporated into the design of your piano by the manufacturer. It contributes to its volume and tone production. Outside of the piano, however, it’s an unwanted effect. It’s the well-known phenomenon where an opera singer can hit a certain note and cause a wine glass to shatter. Your piano isn’t going to break any windows, but certain notes played loudly can cause certain nearby object to rattle and buzz annoyingly. If it’s a problem, simply remove the object or move it further away. Resonance tends to be worse if the piano is sitting on a hard wooden floor as that allows the sound to transmit through the floorboards to susceptible objects further away. Having the room carpeted or at least partially carpeted where the piano sits should not only solve that problem, it looks good too.
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| Piano Room |
Aesthetics
As one of the world’s classiest and most sophisticated musical instruments, the piano deserves an equally sophisticated environment. A warm and tasteful colour scheme and lighting make the room a place you want to spend a lot of time in and invite guests who want to hear you play. A few well-placed, musically-themed ornaments and framed wall-hanging prints not only contribute to an appropriate musical environment, they also emphasise your musical awareness. Suitable ornaments could include a mechanical (not digital) metronome, a wrought-metal treble clef, a bust or framed print of a revered classical composer such as Chopin, or if you’re a jazz lover, someone iconic such as Duke Ellington.
Author Bio:
James Pointon is an experienced realtor supporting OpenAgent – experts on the real estate market. Interested in the art of designing and decorating houses, James might often be found sharing his suggestions with clients and readers.
February 14, 2017
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