7 ms·

I never understood why the piano keyboard isn't regular. It forces players to remember different positions for the same chord transposed to start at different n

by ajuc 1y ago

I never understood why the piano keyboard isn't regular. It forces players to remember different positions for the same chord transposed to start at different notes. Like why do I have to remember the shape for C major and D major chords? It should be the same shape just starting at C vs D. It's not even that hard to fix. There's 12 semitones in an octave. Just make it 6 white 6 black keys.

tetraodonpuffer 1y ago
having the keyboard the way it is also allows you to more easily orient yourself, you can feel with the sides of your fingers if you are next to E/F or B/C and with the corner of your eye it's also straightforward to figure it out. I don't think it'd be possible (or anyways even more difficult than it is now) to play large jumps accurately if the whole keyboard looked the same
- paulgerhardt 1y ago
  I think both of those concerns were addressed by the Dvorak of piano keyboards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard Has the symmetry of GP while large jumps are accomplished by shifting up a row or two. I assume it didn’t take off for the same reason Dvorak didn’t.
- ajuc 1y ago
  Make a dimple on every C key and paint it red.
  - toast0 1y ago
    That's all fine and dandy, except early apple keyboards have the dimples one key over :p
- bluGill 1y ago
  There are multiple alterative layout that some advocate for. they generally do sonething else for orintation. putting a bump on middle c and other places.
krallja 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard available since 1882!
jng 1y ago
The white keys form a sequence of notes (frequencies) that is known as the diatonic scale. It's the foundation underlying all popular western music. It is not random or arbitrary, it has some nice dual mathematical and musical properties: intervals between the notes in the scale have special frequency ratios that sound pleasing to the ear (read Helmholtz's "On the sensations of tone" for a fascinating physically-based take on why it is like that -- he is known as "the father of acoustics", and that book contains the distillation of 8 years of deep, smart research way before we had the means or understanding we hav today). A ton, if not most, of popular music can be played using only the white keys. There used to be keyboards with other different arrangements, which were actually extremely cumbersome and actually didn't allow very rich and interesting musical excursions like modulations (look up "microtonal keyboards"). Today's standard keyboard and tuning is a compromise between those fundamentally mathematical and perceptual acoustic relations (the tonic, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the major and minor third, the "sensible" or subtonic...) and the ability to perform those trans-tonality excursions. A fully regular keyboard like you propose would lend itself more easily to those excursions, at the cost of being less apt at the foundational diatonic model and most popular music. Interestingly also, the notes used by modern keyboards and all modern instruments, and to which we are all so accustomed that we thing it "just is", is an imperfect compromise that needed a lot of selling back in the day, much of which was done by Bach (the compromise scale is called the "tempered scale", and Bach authored the arch-famous "Well-tempered clavier" pieces to show it off -- impossible to perform on keyboards with other tunings). And of course, there is a tradition factor. English isn't written like this because it's optimizing for any easily describable or measurable optimization metric, more like it minimized a socio-perceptual function covering many centuries of UX. Finally, if you want an instrument where all keys are equal, you can always move to a fretboard based one like the guitar. Funnily, it has a one-semitone-short jump between strings 3 and 2 that will throw off the desire of full regularity... again due to diatonic leanings. A bass guitar is fully regular, even when they add a 5th and 6th string, so that may fulfill your wish of a fully regular instrument... and it sounds awesome! Just can't do the same things as a piano or a guitar.
- ofalkaed 1y ago
  >Interestingly also, the notes used by modern keyboards and all modern instruments Vast majority of fretted instruments since the death of the lute are untempered. Edit: Which is not to suggest that lutes were tempered. Lutes and other tied fret instruments allow for unequal fret spacing so you can temper one string at the cost of more notes being more off from the temperament on other strings, or the frets being at an angle so you could find a bit of a compromise. But often they were EDO or in the ancient tradition of fretted instruments, close enough for rock and roll.
brudgers 1y ago
It forces players to remember different positions for the same chord transposed to start at different notes. The piano was developed well before equal temperament came to dominate tuning. [1] So each musical key would have different harmonic relationships between the intervals within it. And musical keys were not thought of as equal. Generally, the musical keys based on “black keys”/“sharps and flats” would be farther from an ideal tuning and there were better and worse sounding keys depending on which musical keys a piano was tuned for. Historically in Western European music, there were preferred keys and intervals inherited from Plain Chant (roughly C,G, & F and octave, perfect 4th, perfect 5th, and the 6th). Of course using an electronic instrument that can be electronically transposed up and down by half steps might be an easy way to avoid learning lots of fingerings. [1] https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~mrubinst/tuning/tuning.html https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~mrubinst/tuning/tuning.html
- rollcat 1y ago
  Somewhat related: https://strandbergguitars.com/true-temperament/ https://strandbergguitars.com/true-temperament/
IsTom 1y ago
Historically before twelve tone equal temperament playing in another key on a keyboard instrument would sound different.
skybrian 1y ago
Chromatic button accordions have each octave in three rows of four instead of two rows of five and seven like a piano. It's very regular, but doesn't match up with major or minor scales or with sheet music. A major scale is a zig-zag. I play both piano and button accordion and they're just different. Neither one has a compelling advantage.
yayitswei 1y ago
I'm picky about layouts - I type in Dvorak, learned Janko via Chromatone, currently playing harpejji. Coming from a classical piano background, there was definitely a learning curve, but I feel like it was worth it. Every chord shape is identical across all keys (C major and D major would be played the same way), which makes it much easier to learn jazz voicings or modulate a song. If anyone ever builds a quality grand piano with Janko layout, I'm buying! Hacks on hacks become unnecessary if you start with the right design.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
ncake 1y ago
Same. I recently tried to find a MIDI keyboard like that for sale and got nothing. Apparently this is what it's called: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodeka_keyboard https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodeka_keyboard
Nition 1y ago
With the irregular layout we have now, some keys are easy (e.g. C) and some are hard (e.g. B). If you make the layout regular, putting a black note between every white note, then every key becomes the same, but also quite hard, because every major scale is now played like this: https://i.imgur.com/6EmW8eU.gif https://i.imgur.com/6EmW8eU.gif It's not a particularly good tradeoff. If you got rid of the black keys entirely instead, you'd have to remember which keys to skip. Harder for beginners than just playing in C. There is the Janko keyboard though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janko_keyboard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janko_keyboard
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- drabbiticus 1y ago
  That regular layout also makes it likely to feel better to the hand to play diminished or augmented chords, while comparatively punishing major/minor chords. It would be an odd choice considering the traditions of western music. There's also something to be said about each key having a specific motor pattern/spatial layout. Sure, it makes it harder to move knowledge of one key into another, but during playing it also makes it easier to not accidentally completely change the key unless you mean to. It's all tradeoffs.
- sambapa 1y ago
  C is one of the hardest keys to play in on the piano
  - Nition 1y ago
    Can you elaborate on your thinking here? I really feel C is the easiest (in standard major tonality - obviously C minor, blues scale etc are a different story).
    - Macha 1y ago
      It's the easiest to learn because it's just the white keys in sequence. It's not the most physically comfortable to play because your hand is not a rectangle.
Snarwin 1y ago
It's not actually that much to remember. There are 3 shapes that cover most of the major chords, and 3 special cases (F♯, B♭, and B).
- ajuc 1y ago
  And then you add 4th note and you break the accidental 3-note symmetries :)
yongjik 1y ago
That's a bit like complaining that there are six different kinds of chess pieces and you have to memorize how each moves. The truth is, if you have trouble remembering how a knight moves, you can't be that good at Chess anyway. Remembering twelve different ways of playing a scale is a vastly small part of learning how to play a piano.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- amingilani 1y ago
  > if you have trouble remembering how a knight moves, you can't be that good at Chess anyway. Non sequitur. It’s also still a valid question. I play the scales really well on the guitar. And because the frets are all laid out straight, shifting up by one fret means I’m just playing my chords and scales sharp. It makes transposing music incredibly easy. I still don’t understand why the piano can’t be laid out like that.
  - ajuc 1y ago
    Guitar still has the problem of last 2 strings being shifted 1 semitone down for ergonomics reasons, which makes them irregular. But yeah, it's better than piano keyboard.
- ajuc 1y ago
  Criticizing chess for lacking elegance compared to for example go is very valid (and a good analogy here).
tgv 1y ago
There still would be two "shapes": C vs C#. Transposing would only be easier by two semitones. But for most music and musicians it isn't that interesting. Transposing is rather niche. If it's too hard, an electronic keyboard can do it for you.
- ajuc 1y ago
  There would be 2 shapes instead of 12. And the C shape would be vertically flipped C# shape.
  - tgv 1y ago
    There aren't 12 shapes. My fingers say C maj, F maj and G maj are the same shape. D maj, E maj, A maj too. And A min is the same shape as C/F/G maj, but would be a different pattern on the proposed "regular" layout. That may not matter when all you want is transposition, but as I said before: transposing is not so important. And there are "shape" based keyboards, as mentioned frequently in the comments. You can even retrofit some on your own keyboard. They're just not popular.
    - ajuc 1y ago
      C maj, F maj are the same, but C maj7 and Fmaj7 are not. Ultimately you have to remember which chords are the same and which aren't - which is about the same amount of information as just remembering all the combinations. It's just an ugly irregular hack. I understand that you can get good at working around it, but eventually it's worth it to fix the underlying problem.
derriz 1y ago
The geometric relationship between the note frequencies of a C major chord and a D major chord on the piano is not the same. The key of piece is responsible for some of its “feel”. So it’s not unreasonable that they have different “representations” on the piano although the differences may be subtle.
- codyd51 1y ago
  I believe this is not the case in today’s ubiquitous equal temperament?
  - derriz 1y ago
    You are correct - my mistake.
jacquesm 1y ago
There are such things are Chromatic keyboards (for instance, the Chromatone synth had one), and there was the Janko piano keyboard and there are people that have made keyboards without the spaces in at the B/C and E/F at the back of the keyboard by alternating the white and the black keys such that those spaces just disappear. The advantages are: - you need less reach for the same chords - transposition becomes trivial The disadvantages are: - your muscle memory will be invalidated - the number of instruments set up like that is really small - no accomplished pianist will want to switch But if you really wanted to you could adapt an existing instrument to use a different keyboard and it isn't even all that complicated (medium complexity wood working project).
kashunstva 1y ago
> It's not even that hard to fix. Except it would render a large swath of the repertoire from the common practice period (“classical music“) more difficult to play because it is written with the presumption that the keyboard is just so and that some future generations won’t try to optimize it. The organization of the keyboard does necessitate certain fingering choices that are particular; but knowing this, composers have (usually) written in a way that respects that geometry.

by ajuc 1y ago

tetraodonpuffer 1y ago

having the keyboard the way it is also allows you to more easily orient yourself, you can feel with the sides of your fingers if you are next to E/F or B/C and with the corner of your eye it's also straightforward to figure it out. I don't think it'd be possible (or anyways even more difficult than it is now) to play large jumps accurately if the whole keyboard looked the same

paulgerhardt 1y ago
I think both of those concerns were addressed by the Dvorak of piano keyboards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard Has the symmetry of GP while large jumps are accomplished by shifting up a row or two. I assume it didn’t take off for the same reason Dvorak didn’t.
ajuc 1y ago
Make a dimple on every C key and paint it red.
- toast0 1y ago
  That's all fine and dandy, except early apple keyboards have the dimples one key over :p
bluGill 1y ago
There are multiple alterative layout that some advocate for. they generally do sonething else for orintation. putting a bump on middle c and other places.

krallja 1y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jank%C3%B3_keyboard available since 1882!

jng 1y ago

The white keys form a sequence of notes (frequencies) that is known as the diatonic scale. It's the foundation underlying all popular western music. It is not random or arbitrary, it has some nice dual mathematical and musical properties: intervals between the notes in the scale have special frequency ratios that sound pleasing to the ear (read Helmholtz's "On the sensations of tone" for a fascinating physically-based take on why it is like that -- he is known as "the father of acoustics", and that book contains the distillation of 8 years of deep, smart research way before we had the means or understanding we hav today). A ton, if not most, of popular music can be played using only the white keys. There used to be keyboards with other different arrangements, which were actually extremely cumbersome and actually didn't allow very rich and interesting musical excursions like modulations (look up "microtonal keyboards"). Today's standard keyboard and tuning is a compromise between those fundamentally mathematical and perceptual acoustic relations (the tonic, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the major and minor third, the "sensible" or subtonic...) and the ability to perform those trans-tonality excursions. A fully regular keyboard like you propose would lend itself more easily to those excursions, at the cost of being less apt at the foundational diatonic model and most popular music. Interestingly also, the notes used by modern keyboards and all modern instruments, and to which we are all so accustomed that we thing it "just is", is an imperfect compromise that needed a lot of selling back in the day, much of which was done by Bach (the compromise scale is called the "tempered scale", and Bach authored the arch-famous "Well-tempered clavier" pieces to show it off -- impossible to perform on keyboards with other tunings). And of course, there is a tradition factor. English isn't written like this because it's optimizing for any easily describable or measurable optimization metric, more like it minimized a socio-perceptual function covering many centuries of UX. Finally, if you want an instrument where all keys are equal, you can always move to a fretboard based one like the guitar. Funnily, it has a one-semitone-short jump between strings 3 and 2 that will throw off the desire of full regularity... again due to diatonic leanings. A bass guitar is fully regular, even when they add a 5th and 6th string, so that may fulfill your wish of a fully regular instrument... and it sounds awesome! Just can't do the same things as a piano or a guitar.

ofalkaed 1y ago
>Interestingly also, the notes used by modern keyboards and all modern instruments Vast majority of fretted instruments since the death of the lute are untempered. Edit: Which is not to suggest that lutes were tempered. Lutes and other tied fret instruments allow for unequal fret spacing so you can temper one string at the cost of more notes being more off from the temperament on other strings, or the frets being at an angle so you could find a bit of a compromise. But often they were EDO or in the ancient tradition of fretted instruments, close enough for rock and roll.

brudgers 1y ago

It forces players to remember different positions for the same chord transposed to start at different notes. The piano was developed well before equal temperament came to dominate tuning. [1] So each musical key would have different harmonic relationships between the intervals within it. And musical keys were not thought of as equal. Generally, the musical keys based on “black keys”/“sharps and flats” would be farther from an ideal tuning and there were better and worse sounding keys depending on which musical keys a piano was tuned for. Historically in Western European music, there were preferred keys and intervals inherited from Plain Chant (roughly C,G, & F and octave, perfect 4th, perfect 5th, and the 6th). Of course using an electronic instrument that can be electronically transposed up and down by half steps might be an easy way to avoid learning lots of fingerings. [1] https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~mrubinst/tuning/tuning.html https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~mrubinst/tuning/tuning.html

rollcat 1y ago
Somewhat related: https://strandbergguitars.com/true-temperament/ https://strandbergguitars.com/true-temperament/

IsTom 1y ago

Historically before twelve tone equal temperament playing in another key on a keyboard instrument would sound different.

skybrian 1y ago

Chromatic button accordions have each octave in three rows of four instead of two rows of five and seven like a piano. It's very regular, but doesn't match up with major or minor scales or with sheet music. A major scale is a zig-zag. I play both piano and button accordion and they're just different. Neither one has a compelling advantage.

yayitswei 1y ago

I'm picky about layouts - I type in Dvorak, learned Janko via Chromatone, currently playing harpejji. Coming from a classical piano background, there was definitely a learning curve, but I feel like it was worth it. Every chord shape is identical across all keys (C major and D major would be played the same way), which makes it much easier to learn jazz voicings or modulate a song. If anyone ever builds a quality grand piano with Janko layout, I'm buying! Hacks on hacks become unnecessary if you start with the right design.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

ncake 1y ago

Same. I recently tried to find a MIDI keyboard like that for sale and got nothing. Apparently this is what it's called: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodeka_keyboard https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodeka_keyboard

Nition 1y ago

With the irregular layout we have now, some keys are easy (e.g. C) and some are hard (e.g. B). If you make the layout regular, putting a black note between every white note, then every key becomes the same, but also quite hard, because every major scale is now played like this: https://i.imgur.com/6EmW8eU.gif https://i.imgur.com/6EmW8eU.gif It's not a particularly good tradeoff. If you got rid of the black keys entirely instead, you'd have to remember which keys to skip. Harder for beginners than just playing in C. There is the Janko keyboard though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janko_keyboard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janko_keyboard

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
drabbiticus 1y ago
That regular layout also makes it likely to feel better to the hand to play diminished or augmented chords, while comparatively punishing major/minor chords. It would be an odd choice considering the traditions of western music. There's also something to be said about each key having a specific motor pattern/spatial layout. Sure, it makes it harder to move knowledge of one key into another, but during playing it also makes it easier to not accidentally completely change the key unless you mean to. It's all tradeoffs.
sambapa 1y ago
C is one of the hardest keys to play in on the piano
- Nition 1y ago
  Can you elaborate on your thinking here? I really feel C is the easiest (in standard major tonality - obviously C minor, blues scale etc are a different story).
  - Macha 1y ago
    It's the easiest to learn because it's just the white keys in sequence. It's not the most physically comfortable to play because your hand is not a rectangle.

Snarwin 1y ago

It's not actually that much to remember. There are 3 shapes that cover most of the major chords, and 3 special cases (F♯, B♭, and B).

ajuc 1y ago
And then you add 4th note and you break the accidental 3-note symmetries :)

yongjik 1y ago

That's a bit like complaining that there are six different kinds of chess pieces and you have to memorize how each moves. The truth is, if you have trouble remembering how a knight moves, you can't be that good at Chess anyway. Remembering twelve different ways of playing a scale is a vastly small part of learning how to play a piano.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
amingilani 1y ago
> if you have trouble remembering how a knight moves, you can't be that good at Chess anyway. Non sequitur. It’s also still a valid question. I play the scales really well on the guitar. And because the frets are all laid out straight, shifting up by one fret means I’m just playing my chords and scales sharp. It makes transposing music incredibly easy. I still don’t understand why the piano can’t be laid out like that.
- ajuc 1y ago
  Guitar still has the problem of last 2 strings being shifted 1 semitone down for ergonomics reasons, which makes them irregular. But yeah, it's better than piano keyboard.
ajuc 1y ago
Criticizing chess for lacking elegance compared to for example go is very valid (and a good analogy here).

tgv 1y ago

There still would be two "shapes": C vs C#. Transposing would only be easier by two semitones. But for most music and musicians it isn't that interesting. Transposing is rather niche. If it's too hard, an electronic keyboard can do it for you.

ajuc 1y ago
There would be 2 shapes instead of 12. And the C shape would be vertically flipped C# shape.
- tgv 1y ago
  There aren't 12 shapes. My fingers say C maj, F maj and G maj are the same shape. D maj, E maj, A maj too. And A min is the same shape as C/F/G maj, but would be a different pattern on the proposed "regular" layout. That may not matter when all you want is transposition, but as I said before: transposing is not so important. And there are "shape" based keyboards, as mentioned frequently in the comments. You can even retrofit some on your own keyboard. They're just not popular.
  - ajuc 1y ago
    C maj, F maj are the same, but C maj7 and Fmaj7 are not. Ultimately you have to remember which chords are the same and which aren't - which is about the same amount of information as just remembering all the combinations. It's just an ugly irregular hack. I understand that you can get good at working around it, but eventually it's worth it to fix the underlying problem.

derriz 1y ago

The geometric relationship between the note frequencies of a C major chord and a D major chord on the piano is not the same. The key of piece is responsible for some of its “feel”. So it’s not unreasonable that they have different “representations” on the piano although the differences may be subtle.

codyd51 1y ago
I believe this is not the case in today’s ubiquitous equal temperament?
- derriz 1y ago
  You are correct - my mistake.

jacquesm 1y ago

There are such things are Chromatic keyboards (for instance, the Chromatone synth had one), and there was the Janko piano keyboard and there are people that have made keyboards without the spaces in at the B/C and E/F at the back of the keyboard by alternating the white and the black keys such that those spaces just disappear. The advantages are: - you need less reach for the same chords - transposition becomes trivial The disadvantages are: - your muscle memory will be invalidated - the number of instruments set up like that is really small - no accomplished pianist will want to switch But if you really wanted to you could adapt an existing instrument to use a different keyboard and it isn't even all that complicated (medium complexity wood working project).

kashunstva 1y ago

> It's not even that hard to fix. Except it would render a large swath of the repertoire from the common practice period (“classical music“) more difficult to play because it is written with the presumption that the keyboard is just so and that some future generations won’t try to optimize it. The organization of the keyboard does necessitate certain fingering choices that are particular; but knowing this, composers have (usually) written in a way that respects that geometry.