From RALPH HANCOCK
I read your article ‘Mathematical piano sounds a logical note (Technology,
16 May) with a certain sense of Deja vu. In the past century there have
been at least eight attempts to reform the piano keyboard, all of them admirably
logical. One of them, the Janko keyboard, was even promoted by Franz Liszt
and Anton Rubinstein. There have been just as many novel systems of notation.
Nothing much has come of any of them.
Obviously, conservatism and the existence of a vast number of conventional
instruments have played a large role in their failure. But there are other,
more soundly based reasons.
Visually, the conventional keyboard has a distinctive pattern of groups
of two and three black notes. Although this evolved simply as a result of
filling in semitones as they were needed when music was becoming more chromatic,
it must have persisted because it makes the strongest possible impression
on the areas of the visual cortex which register edges. These work efficiently
and quickly even when the edges are in the blurred area of peripheral vision.
It would be very hard to make large jumps on a keyboard with neatly alternating
black and white notes. Music exists in which both hands are required to
leap five octaves twice in a short bar – for example Scarlatti’s sonata
in D minor, K120.
The proposed system of notation takes even less account of human visual
perception. Each stave has nine lines, and the attempt to subdivide it by
dotted lines is barely noticeable. The existing stave of five lines has
not evolved by chance. In the early 17th century the stave commonly had
six lines. The stave was soon reduced to five lines, simply because six
was too hard to read: five is the largest number which may be recognised
at a fleeting glance.
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Ralph Hancock London
