Why is there no black key on a keyboard in between the notes of E and F?
In: 9
It’s setup that way so that the “sharps” and “flats” are all black keys and the “whole” notes are all white keys. Each key, black or white, represents one “half step” of an octave. Since the naming of our musical notes is arbitrary and the results of centuries of custom rather than strict logic, the piano is set up to fit that custom. That custom is that B,C and E,F are half steps apart instead of whole steps.
On a string instrument the arbitrary nature of note naming is made clear. The frequencies in our music all follow a regular pattern of frequency change, there are no weird “gaps” or oddities like the note names or the piano layout imply.
We could just as easily have the note names be:
A, A#, B, B#, C, C#, D, D#, E, E#, F, F#,
and the piano could be laid out with a black key representing a half tone in between each white key, but that would go against millennia of custom so there’s little point in converting.
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