Guess what! A piano is a keyboard (instrument).

Benjamin Barrett gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM
Sun Mar 18 06:03:52 UTC 2012


On Mar 17, 2012, at 10:52 PM, Larry Sheldon wrote:

> On 3/18/2012 12:48 AM, Larry Sheldon wrote:
>>
>> On 3/18/2012 12:40 AM, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
>>
>>> Have you tried n-grams? There might be an interesting increase in use =
>>> for keyboard with respect to classical music, for example. =
>>> http://books.google.com/ngrams
>>
>> Another gaping hole in my toolbag.  No I have not, I'll have a look.
>
> http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=keyboard%2C+concerto&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
>
> Fascinating.  Seems to support my poorly formed hypothesis.
>
> I didn't NEED something else to stay up all night playing with!

LOL.

I've never played with the n-gram tool, but it looks like this just shows that "keyboard" became more common up to the 1980s while "concerto" peaked in the 1940s. Doing a search on "keyboard concerto" gets nothing, and there doesn't seem to be a way to ask about frequency of books with both terms, but I wonder if somehow that can be done...

Benjamin Barrett
Seattle, WA

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