This article outlines the details of this investigation and especially the process of collecting the data.

Before I sent KINGFM an email, admonishing them for playing so much of an instrument I dislike, I wanted to investigate whether my ears were deceiving me. Perhaps my own distaste for the harpsicord increased its impact in my memory.

Seattle is lucky to have KINGFM, a local radio station dedicated to 100% classical music. As one of the few existent classical music fans in his twenties, I listen often enough. Over the past few years, I've noticed that when I tune to the station, I always seem to hear the plinky sound of a harpsicord.

If it ain't baroque...

A harpsicord is in many ways similar to the piano. Pressing down and releasing one of its keys triggers an internal mechanism that plucks a string inside. Resultant vibration of the string produces the corresponding pitch. Because its strings are plucked, the instrument has no dynamic range. Each note sounds at roughly the same volume; however firmly or softly the player strikes the keys. Some harpsicords have several choirs of strings that allow the player limited control of the volume and timbre.

The harpsicord can sound tinny to modern ears. Thomas Beecham famously said, "The sound of a harpsichord - two skeletons copulating on a tin roof in a thunderstorm."

At the start of the 16th century, the newly invented fortepiano began to push both the harpsicord and its close relative, the clavicord out of favor. The new instrument worked more like the modern piano in that its strings were struck with padded hammers. Compared to the other keyboard instruments of its day, it had a more resonant sound and allowed the player to control the dynamics of each note simply by altering the force with which he struck the keys.

The period before the fortepiano, during which the harpsicord had its heyday is known as the Baroque Era. The history of classical music is often divided into several historical "eras" or "periods". The dates that separate them are somewhat arbitrary with substantial overlap, I'll follow Wikipedia in defining these boundaries because they have the most comprehensive composers data with the most permissive licence.

Wikipedia's dates differ little from those outlined by Naxos, a well respected music label with an extremely comprehensive catalog. Unfortunately, the Naxos ToS are extremely restrictive with respect to their composer data.

These eras are:

Medieval (476–1400)

Renaissance (1400–1600)

Baroque (1600–1760)

Classical era (1730–1820)

Romantic era (1815–1910)

20th century (1900–2000)

21st century (since 2000)

Since King seems to play very little music from before 1600, I ignored the Medieval and Renaissance era in my analysis.

Because of the dominance of the piano and its predecessors starting in the Classical Era, one is less likely to find the sound of the harpsicord in modern recordings of anything but Baroque music. Even then, music originally written for harpsicord is often transcribed to the piano and recorded that way. Glenn Gould, perhaps the most famous modern Bach interpreter, is well-known for recordings of such transcriptions.

One exception is opera. Harpsicord was used for accompanying recitative all the way into the late 18th century. For simplicity, we will blissfully ignore this fact.