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How I'd redesign a piano, is with the black keys equal in color and shape to the white keys. That way, transposing a song by a semitone is equivalent to shifting your hands by one key. Much more natural.

I think they call an instrument with this property "chromatic", but I'm not sure.

Actually, perhaps somebody can explain why the black keys were invented. Because their existence makes little sense to me. For example, a guitar is a chromatic instrument, and can be played perfectly fine without any difference between "black" and "white" notes.




You have to ask yourself what should feel more natural: transposing songs or actually playing them. I don't know much about why the piano was designed like this, but I can see your idea wouldn't be useful:

- Black keys are a reference. Either by touching them or by looking at them, you can always know where you are. Not so easy with all the keys being the same. - The size of the keyboard is more or less adapted to our hand size. The distance between whole tones is similar to the distance between our fingers. A fifth is as wide as my hand, and I can play an octave without much effort. Making all the notes the same shape would change that and those common intervals would be more difficult to play. - Our hand is not flat. The fact that some notes are higher than others makes playing more comfortable. - Range. Same-shaped notes would occupy more space (unless you make them smaller than white notes, which would be uncomfortable) so either you get way bigger pianos (as if they were small) or pianos with less range.

There are probably more reasons why the black keys are there, these are just top off my head.


Thanks for your explanation.

I think there is another advantage (to merely having the white keys) besides just transposing being easier. And this is that the same intervals will always have the same spacing on the keyboard. I guess this should be my main argument for this type of layout being more natural.


Yes, they would be the same spacing, but that spacing would be extremely uncomfortable and lots of pieces would become impossible to play. Making the black keys the same size as the white keys, a 8th would become a 13th. I don't have small hands and I can barely reach a 11th interval. Basically, a lot of simultaneous notes could no longer be played. A solution would be to make the keys smaller, but then you wouldn't be able to play semitones because your fingers wouldn't fit comfortably. To fix that, you could raise some keys, so basically you would end up with the current setup.


Good points. But I really don't understand why the keys need to be that big. People are used to typing on smartphones, where the sensitive area of a key is like 30% of the width of a finger. Of course, making them that small would be a little extreme, but I think piano keys could be much slimmer.


Have you seen anyone try to type on a smartphone? Slow, and riddled with typos. Keep piano keys the width they are, unless you want slow, error prone pianists.

Besides, we already have the ideal chromatic keyboard layout:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hexagonal+music+controller&t=lm&ia...


Typing is 1-0, you either press the key or not, there is no need for as much precision.


This is absolutely true. I find it quite difficult to play music in C without looking at my hands if I'm moving around a lot - if I'm in a key with a couple sharps or flats, it's much easier for me.


Such an instrument exists! http://www.rogerlinndesign.com/linnstrument.html

My biggest gripe with this notation is that it assumes you're playing in a key, so the lines go <D E F# G...> for the key of D. That causes the spacing for a D chord and an E chord to look different, even though they're composed of the same intervals.


This stuff gets reinvented every few years.

It never sticks, because there's literally an entire industry devoted to traditional notation and traditional keyboard design.

Meanwhile in pop and electronica everyone started using button grids to trigger loops and samples, and the notation thing was almost completely bypassed.

This is very, very limited a anything busier than a few block chords - which includes a lot of music - will be too dense for it.

Notation evolved in an ad hoc way, so there's certainly a lot wrong with it. But it's good as an efficient representation of music. Most of the examples here would fit on a single line of notation - so this model is around four to eight times less dense.

Try setting something simple like Bach's Prelude No 1 from the WTC and you'll see how inefficient it is.


1. It would make the equivalent keys even further apart and many songs harder, if not impossible to play.

2. The 2-3 key structure makes it obvious where each note is, it would be extremely difficult to find out where the notes are if all keys looked the same.

3. How often do you need to transpose music?




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