Why are a piano’s black keys arranged in groups of three and two?
In: 44
Let me try a shorter EL5.
So in music, notes are arranged in a repeating pattern. Each repeat has 12 notes, arranged like “W-B-W-B-W-W-B-W-B-W-B-W” (W = “white key” note, B=”black key” note). If you ignore the white keys, that is essentially what you observed a “groups of three and two”, except you started with the “group of three”. But since it’s repetitive, it’s the same.
Each repeat is called an “octave” in music, and all the twelve notes (7 whites, and 5 blacks) are actually created equal from a physics point. Let call them note 1 to 12 (note 1,3,5,6,8,10,12 are white and 2,4,7,9,11 are black on piano). It turns out that playing from 1 to 12 without skipping doesn’t sounds that great (you can try if you have a piano), and the western people really likes it when you play the sequence but skips the 2,4,7,9,11th notes. So the designer of the piano made the keys for the “good ones” larger, and colored them white*, and the not so pleasant ones smaller, and colored them “black” and put them in the back a bit.
An interesting bit is that the Chinese and the Japanese likes to skip more, as they only have 5 “white keys” (Chinese, 1,3,5,8,10; Japanese 1,2,6,8,9). That’s how their music have a special “feeling”.
* Feel that rather racism to say that, but I feel that is more accidental. Harpsicord, the precede of piano, actually have color swapped.
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