Harpsichord dynamics.

A very quick answer. I owned a harpsichord for 20 years, knew the maker very well and helped play his instruments in before shipment. The quills of a harpsichord are sized/shaped to suit the thickness of the strings, so do in fact have a different timbre between registers, down to quill, string and position of the plucking point on the string - how far from/near to the bridge. However, the length of the quill which plucks is very short and the mechanism - sliding the registers by hand stops - is quite basic. When listening to discussions in the workshop, both David and one of his (very expert) staff experimented with what they called "half hitch", which is playing at half the plucking length, therefore lower volume. It worked but was not reliable in real life playing. Nowadays, modern technology might well be able to create a way of shading the sound, but even modern delrin quills don't last forever and it's one job - plus tuning and re[lacing strings - that a harpsichord owner needs to learn.

Very short, but was due out of the house a few minutes ago.

A "nostradamic" feeling perhaps...

Maybe Philippe, as a mathematician, would like to fun around with the Bible Code, developed by a mathematician, Michael Droskin, supposed to predict future using the math code applied to the Bible.  But they applied the same code to the book Moby Dick and also found a lot of supposed predictions, since everything could be something that already happened if in a given contest, among thousand of  other things that leaded to nowhere.

But just for fun I wonder what else could they found. Maybe a preddiction to pianoteq.  Why not find out a prediction for a Bosendorfer add-on for 2020?
;-)

Roland use to put harpsichords with dynamics in the sound data banks of most of their digital pianos, and if you want the fair harpsichord behavior you need set to fix velocit . People want dynamic...  But a harpsichord can be good to practice when searching perfectionism, since any tiny mistake, like also soft hiting a unwantred key near the target key can became evident on a non-dynamic instrument like harpsichord.