Why is there no black key on a keyboard in between the notes of E and F?
In: 9
Because there are only 12 notes in music (if we aren’t considering the various octaves).
1. C
2. C#/Db
3. D
4. D#-Eb
5. E
6. F
7. F#/Gb
8. G
9. G#/Ab
10. A
11. A#/Bb
12. B
The black keys on a keyboard are the “half steps” between the white keys. So if you start at middle C, you have:
C-C#-D-D#-E (going left to right)
or E-Eb-D-Db-C (going right to left)
Mathematically, the difference in sound between E and F is equivalent to the difference between C and C#, hence the half step. This is also why there isn’t a black key between B and C, because a B# is just a C, and conversely a Cb is just a B.
I hope this helps. I am by no means a music theory expert. This is simply how my band teacher explained it to me when I was younger =^.^=
The eight white keys from A to A form a “natural minor” scale. The eight white keys from C to C form its /relative/ major scale, C major.
The reason that there are no black keys between B and C or E and F is because in these two scales that the modern keyboard layout is based around, those two “intervals” are already a “half step” – that is, from B to C and E to F are a smaller relative jump in pitch than then rest of the jumps from note to note.
The reason all the jumps are not the same comes from how we hear tones together and what the “sound like” to the ear. Listen to a whole tone scale and you will head that it is odd, doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere and not very satisfying the way a major scale is.
As for why there are black keys in the first place, there was experimentation with adding these “half steps” inside scales to allow for more complex harmony inside of a piece. Things to look up on this subject would be secondary dominants and modal shifting.
Originally though even with the black keys, a harpsichord would still be tuned in a specific key and playing outside of that key would not sound the same. Nowadays we almost exclusively use “equal temperament” which is where each of the 12 half steps half been adjusted to be mathematically equal portions of the “octave”, and close enough to the relative ratio pitches that we still hear them that way.
The benefit is that not a player can play in any key without worrying about the tuning being all wacky. The downside is that no chord is actually quite perfect, even on a freshly tuned instrument.
Look up “just intonation” for examples where this equal temperament has been ditched, and you will find that the harmonies are particularly sweet and satisfying.
Ah.. a bit of physics, a huge amount about human hearing and brains, and a lot of music theory. I’m coming at this from guitar so pardon me if I get this slightly wrong.
It might seem confusing, but an octave has 12 notes with a consistent difference in frequency between them. So each key on a piano is actually the next step (regardless of if its a black or white key).
A piano is setup in the key (or scale) of ‘C’ the white keys correspond to whole notes for that scale and and the black keys correspond to half notes. If you played in a different key (for example the key of ‘D’) the the whole notes and half notes could be a mix of white or black keys. But its always 8 whole notes and 4 half notes in a given octave, spaced the same way you see the black keys on a piano, just shifted by the key.
So that pattern on the piano keyboard is really more about how our ears and brains think certain notes sound next to each other.
The most ELI5 is that they’re already only a half step apart.
When you go up the major scale: C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C, those increments aren’t all the same size. By convention / definition, we have decided the pattern goes whole step, whole step, half step, whole, whole, whole, half.
* When there is a **whole** step between letters, there’s room for a black key that plays the half step between those letters. For example C-sharp (aka B-flat) is the half step between B and C.
* When there is a **half** step between letters, like E and F, there is no room for a black key because *E and F are already only a half step apar*t! An F-flat is just E. An E-sharp is just F.
Short answer:
The C major scale sounds nice for our ears. It requires a whole step from C to D and from D to E, but only a half step from E to F. If we had C major only we would have white keys only. So the black keys appear by half or whole steps in other scales. In the end one key to the next is always a half step and that there is no black key between E and F is behause this is already a half step die to the C major scale.
Long answer:
This is in some sense based on the Harmonic series. First we have to understand why there are 7 tones (white keys) before the same note is repeated. This number is kind of arbitrary and is a result of training our ears to the sound of „nice“ and „not so nice“ intervals. In some cultures there would be 5 tones only (Pentatonic) before a key gets repeated (like in Wind chimes).
When playing the key of let‘s say 100 Hz on the piano, you hear the tone G. For better understanding on the piano I will wrongly say that 100 Hz is a C it is easier to see on a piano. Now every other string inside of the piano that has a multiple of this frequency starts to vibrate as well. The 100 Hz (C) very strong of course, the 200 Hz (C again) a little less. The 300 Hz string (G) much less, you can barely hear it, and so on: 400 Hz (C again), 500 Hz (E), 600 Hz (G), 700 Hz (a slightly flat B) and 800 Hz (C again), 900 Hz (D) and 1000 Hz (E). Eventually every tone would appear at a very high frequency.
As said, we felt through the centuries of to development of the European music that taking the first 7 different tones „that sound good“ should be used before one gets repeated. As one can see, doubling the frequency results in the same tone (and vice versa). So to get 7 notes between the two Cs of 200 and 400 Hz we take halfs or quarters of the other notes and they are still the same. The result is:
C 200 Hz
D 225 Hz
E 250 Hz
F 267 Hz
G 300 Hz
A 333 Hz
B 350 Hz
C 400 Hz
These are more or less the white keys of a piano. Between E and F the frequency distance is quite low. Taking the same scale for each of these white keys, we sometimes need other distances and need the additional 5 black keys. These additional black keys appear between the higher distances in frequency and not between E and F or B and C.
Notes were not arbitrarily defined, they were discovered. The ancient Greeks experimented a lot with various sets of notes to find out which sound good together, they tried various systems of music, some of which sound downright exotic to the modern ear, but what caught on was the seven diatonic modes, which the Greeks called the Ionian, Lydian, Dorian, Aeolian, Mixolydian, Phrygian and Locrian. These modes were built from notes that are the modern “white keys”. The Greeks found out that these specific notes form nice sounding chords and melodies.
Then, in the Age of Enlightenment, European musicians started to examine the diatonic closer, and found out that not all of the notes are equally spaced: some of them differ by a tone, and some by a half tone. So they invented black keys: new notes to be inserted everywhere where there would be a whole tone difference. If there would be a half tone difference between the diatonic notes inherited from the Greeks, though, there was no space to insert a new note. Then equal temperament was invented: the frequences of notes, both old and new, were slightly adjusted to allow easy transposition of every mode and key to every tonic note. And this is how the modern set of notes was created.
We still use the Greek modes in modern music, especially Ionian, which is more often called the major scale or natural major. We just learned to add some extra notes for a little variety.
Some of the answers above might not give you the whole picture. So this isn’t ELI5 but it’s more complete:
Keyboard instruments were originally designed around what’s called the diatonic scale. Others have tried to describe this scale to you. The reasons we use this scale are somewhat conjectural; we know the ancient Greeks invented it, and we know how and why it works, but we don’t know exactly how they discovered it or why they stuck with it versus other systems (of which there are many). The most common explanation is attributed to Pythagoras, who described pitch relationships as ratios. If you pluck a string, and then pluck a string half that length, the notes sound the same (an octave, or C to C as an example). If you pluck a string and then pluck a string 2/3rds as long, you get what sounds like a fifth (C to G). If you pluck a string and then ADD a third to it, you get another fifth but lowered (C to F below). You’ve now got the notes C, F, and G. The distance from C up to F is the same as the distance from G up to C. From there it’s conjecture how the Greeks decided to fill in the gaps between each of those notes, but they landed on two notes in between each pairing (C D E F, and then G A B C). The most common theory is if you keep playing notes a fifth away you get all the notes of the scale (C G D A E B F). You’ll notice the distance between each of those notes is analogous between both pairings (C to D is the same distance as G to A and so on). The distance between E and F and B and C is acoustically and aurally closer than the other distances (what we now call a half step). These two groups made up the fundamental groupings of the diatonic scale in Greek music, what we now call tetrachords.
From the ancient Greeks up through the late Middle Ages, most western music used these two groupings of tetrachords, or as we call it now the diatonic scale. Early keyboard instruments used it as well, and didn’t have anything resembling black keys… every key was ostensibly a diatonic note. But something changed in the late Middle Ages… formal music transitioned from tuning things based on the interval of a fifth, and instead moved to the interval of third. Well, that posed a problem. In the diatonic scale, the fifth of every note is somewhere in the scale. But that’s not the case with the thirds. The third between C and E sounds different than the third between D and F. So composers and keyboard makers had to insert half step notes in between to be able to play these new intervals, which resulted in the addition of F#, G#, and C# (D# didn’t come along until much later for reasons related to the weirdness of B and it’s a whole other thing). But still keyboard makers added these as white notes, not separated black notes.
The final step came with the rise of tonal music and instruments. Until the Baroque, formal music was based heavily around the human voice. Instruments were crude and expensive and in some cases even banned from churches. Since Chant used the diatonic scale, the music of the renaissance was based on this scale and used modes to unify different parts… our modern concept of a “key” didn’t exist. This meant you got the sound you wanted from centering your melody around a certain note of the diatonic scale, rather than the distances between each degree in the scale. But the movement toward intervals of thirds created a distinctive sound created by what we now term “half steps” that wanted to lead to other notes, creating tonal music and the concept of a modern “key.” At around the same time, instrumental music started to come into its own and the forerunner of the modern orchestra began to develop. But instruments play best in certain keys only (horn in F, for example, before the invention of modern valves). This meant that if a keyboard player wanted to play with a horn player, they had to be able to center around F but still play in the major or minor “key” that the horn player was using. So they had to invent a way to create the same pattern of whole and half steps of that “key” no matter what note you started on. All the other sharps and flats were born.
This created so many keys they had to start separating them into black and white. Why didn’t they alternate black white black white the whole way (so that F, G , A and B were black notes)? It’s visually confusing: there are no landmarks to guide you. So they broke it into groups of two then three black notes alternating, and coincidentally kept the original diatonic scale intact on the white notes. The original half steps naturally present in the diatonic scale didn’t get the black note half step treatment the other notes got.
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.
The current answers are kinda technical so here’s a less technical answer:
There are generally 12 repeating notes in western music. A collection of 7 of them in a certain pattern generally sound good and most western songs will stick to using these 7. This pattern can start anywhere though, so you have 12 different sets of 7, referred to as keys.
This pattern of 7 is so important that we don’t have 12 letter note names, we picked one note as a starting location and named only the 7 in the cool pattern with letters, and made the other 5 flats/sharps. This does leave two empty spaces, as the cool pattern doesn’t go every other, some of the 7 are right next to each other.
In addition, from a keyboard design perspective, having white-black-white-black repeating forever would be a nightmare to play on as you can’t easily see what note you are going to play at a glance because everything looks the same. The uneven pattern allows keyboardists to see and feel where they are in moments.
Before opening this thread I stared way too long at my computer keyboard trying to figure out why I never saw a black key between E and F……music keyboards….got it.
Latest Answers