It happened again. I’m practicing as usual but hear a buzzing vibration noise coming from somewhere close to the piano when I play only certain keys. The first time this happened, maybe a couple years ago, I thought the noise was coming from my piano lamp, the one that is hooked onto the music stand and comes up and over the stand and has four light bulbs. The bulbs sometimes loosen up from my playing and then make a rattling noise, or they just start blinking like a strobe light (that’s not so good, either). As many of you know, when you are recording, you want to eliminate all interfering sounds the best you can, and my ears are very sensitive to sounds like this and rattling/vibration noises drives me nuts!

Anyway, the first time I heard the noise, I stopped playing, tightened all the light bulbs, gave a couple whacks to the fixture, you know….the usual stuff, but the vibration noise continued – but only when I played a certain key on the piano. After trying repeatedly to look on my piano for whatever was making that noise, I asked my son to come and play the key so I could walk away from the piano and hope to find the source. Turns out, the noise was coming from a candleholder that sits on my fireplace mantel which is about 12 feet behind where I sit at the piano. Whenever I played the D-sharp or A-flat, whatever it was, the sound wave would affect that one candleholder but nothing else. Once I jiggled the base of the candleholder, the vibration noise stopped. When the same thing happened again this evening, I noticed that it was the sound wave of a high F-sharp that was shooting across the room to the candleholder on the fireplace. Isn’t that weird? I know it has something to do with physics and things that are probably way over my head, but I think it is just plain strange. Even stranger is that both times it was when I was playing Chopin. You don’t think…:wink:

Any of you deal with things like this?

I have that too although it's not connected with Chopin. An old metal money box up on my music cupboard has a loose fixture which likes to resonate at one specific frequency, i.e. one particular note. Took me some time to find where that came from, it was much annoying. And there have been other (mostly older) metallic objects in my room that did this, and which I have had to rearrange or hide. So, nothing unusual here.

yeah, but what I don't understand is why it didn't happen the day before? I probably play F-sharps everyday, so why did that frequency affect that candleholder only these two times, I wonder? Another noise that is bothering me a lot lately is my bench. The leather on it has started to make 'leather' noises (for lack of a better word). Squeak is not correct, it's more like a creak, a leather creaking noise.

Sounds to me like your house is just haunted... nothing to be worried about

jk hahaha

Yeah that happens to me sometimes with different things sitting on the piano or somewhere around the room... It always takes me a while to figure out where it's coming from and I too think it's very intriguing that it will just start doing it one day, when you play one note. But when you played that note before it didn't do it

.......leather noises! LOL

That must be because today, they're out to get you


Fancy having a leather piano bench... You better sit still on it or else !

I think you are right!

I don't think I move very much, so it must be from the pound I recently gained from eating too much spaghetti.