Todays grand pianos are direct descendants of harpsichords built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Around 1700, Bartolomeo Cristofori experimented with creating a harpsichord that could play music more expressively, and devised an action that struck the strings with hammers, differing from harpsichords that plucked the strings with quills. The other major feature of his early piano action was a hammer escapement mechanism, that enabled the hammer to disengage from the key once the note had been played, and then played again at a different velocity, changing the expressiveness of the notes. Cristofori's early pianos retained much of the stringing design of harpsichords, and sounded much like them, with the exception of the expression the player could now introduce to the music through the touch response

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