‘Underwater pianist’ Joe Jenkins is a virtuoso in the art of producing videos in which pianos are performed in odd settings. His acoustic exploits, which have taken place anywhere from in front of Buckingham Palace to inside a real hot air balloon, have earned him more than four million fans on YouTube.
One of Jenkins’s fans issued a dare to the pianist to play a piano that had been submerged in water as his most recent musical endeavor. Jenkins accepted the challenge.
Jenkins describes the performance he does in this video by saying, “In this video, I play the song ‘Beneath the Water’ truly under the sea.”
The YouTuber does a dive in the deep seas off Swanage, which is located on the south coast of England, while playing the song “Under the Sea” from Disney’s The Little Mermaid. He is dressed in scuba diving gear and a two-piece red suit.
A few days before the filming, he made an appearance on a television show in the UK and said that he would accept the challenge.
However, despite the fact that the sculpture does, in fact, produce soothing classical music, the piano cannot be played.
Jenkins said that obtaining a piano whose keys would not expand when submerged in water was a problem in and of itself, and that this was a logistical issue.
After much deliberation, he decided to go with a Shannon Lindner instrument that he had previously acquired from a Tewkesbury family.
Mechanisms in Lindner pianos are made of plastic rather than wood since plastic does not expand as wood does. In the video, Jenkins expresses his belief that “I believe that will be the key to curing my issue!”
Jenkins played a brief performance of The Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” for the family at their home before transferring the piano to its new location, so that they could have a feel for it before it was moved.
On the YouTube video, he explains, “Like a yellow submarine, I made my piano into a submarine and I waterproofed [the instrument].”
Jenkins was almost ready to play the piano underwater, but there was one more challenge he needed to overcome: he needed to figure out how to make the piano keys sound underwater.
He modified the hammers of the piano by attaching pins to them, which caused metal discs, rather than felt, to strike the strings. This resulted in a sound that was more reminiscent of a harpsichord.