Why are a piano’s black keys arranged in groups of three and two?
In: 44
The older I get the more elegant it appears. There’s some deep symmetry that arises from this. The most easily seen is that you have (in every octave)
W B W B W
B W B W B
With a tritone separating them (F and B).
The older I get the more elegant it appears. There’s some deep symmetry that arises from this. The most easily seen is that you have (in every octave)
W B W B W
B W B W B
With a tritone separating them (F and B).
The white keys all together make C major or A minor, all the black keys are flats/sharps. So they mark the increments in those scales and can be used to visualize the increments in the other keys.
The white keys all together make C major or A minor, all the black keys are flats/sharps. So they mark the increments in those scales and can be used to visualize the increments in the other keys.
The older I get the more elegant it appears. There’s some deep symmetry that arises from this. The most easily seen is that you have (in every octave)
W B W B W
B W B W B
With a tritone separating them (F and B).
The white keys all together make C major or A minor, all the black keys are flats/sharps. So they mark the increments in those scales and can be used to visualize the increments in the other keys.
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Sound waves can have different frequencies, and this pretty much correlates to pitch. Higher pitch has higher frequency. But you can have a sound is between the standard notes. So sound frequencies can be anything, the ones that are notes can be thought of a ladder. You can’t stand between two rungs, only on one.
How they’re spaced involves some math into music theory, so let’s jump ahead to the chromatic scale. This is a twelve-note scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatonic_and_chromatic goes into more depth of scales that are a subset, for example a C major scale.
An instrument like the violin or trombone can make pitches between the notes. For a violin, you can put your finger at any point, not just the frets like on a guitar. With a piano you’re not changing the length of the string, you’re sounding a separate set of strings.
You could arrange a piano keyboard with one row of the same color key, one per tone on the chromatic scale, but then you’d need to keep track of what size steps to make for your major and minor scales: Do you skip a key or not to go up or down one full note? For chords, what shape do you need to make with your fingers?
Among other things, having a repeating pattern means you can locate a given note by its place in the pattern.
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