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    Piano Keyboards Comparison

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    ian.loyden
    The document discusses the flaws in the conventional piano keyboard design and proposes alternative designs. It argues the standard design is uncomfortable and limits performance. It presents spiral and fractal based designs, and the author's ultimate design where keys are uniformly spaced and lie in a single plane to allow smooth transitions between chords.

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    Piano Keyboards Comparison

    Uploaded by

    ian.loyden
    13 views12 pages
    The document discusses the flaws in the conventional piano keyboard design and proposes alternative designs. It argues the standard design is uncomfortable and limits performance. It presents spiral and fractal based designs, and the author's ultimate design where keys are uniformly spaced and lie in a single plane to allow smooth transitions between chords.

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    Piano Keyboards comparison

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    The document discusses the flaws in the conventional piano keyboard design and proposes alternative designs. It argues the standard design is uncomfortable and limits performance. It presents spiral and fractal based designs, and the author's ultimate design where keys are uniformly spaced and lie in a single plane to allow smooth transitions between chords.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    13 views12 pages

    Piano Keyboards Comparison

    Uploaded by

    ian.loyden
    The document discusses the flaws in the conventional piano keyboard design and proposes alternative designs. It argues the standard design is uncomfortable and limits performance. It presents spiral and fractal based designs, and the author's ultimate design where keys are uniformly spaced and lie in a single plane to allow smooth transitions between chords.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 12

    Why Piano has a poorly designed keyboard

    and what is the ultimate piano keyboard design

    an illustrated essay concerning the conventional piano


    keyboard and its new alternatives by comparing their pros
    and cons to result in the ultimate piano keyboard design
    piano keyboard
    the standard piano keyboard is bad… its design is uncomfortable for the human hand and also limits the per-
    formance and the fingering configuration of chords and tone sequences.

    this common design was not even deduced from the topology of human
    hand while it definitely should have been.
    for the same type of chords or scales there are different fingerings so the performer has to wriggle their fingers between
    the smaller and raised keys (black)…
    …while in others the player should be careful not
    to accidentally press some adjacent narrow area of a
    big key (white) because both areas are really narrow!

    when the thumb is on a small (black) key the rest fin-


    gers inevitably have to be placed at the very back of
    the keys to perform a chord or a phrase!
    to be possible to place all the keys of the standard
    piano keyboard the smallest (black) had to be nar-
    rowed and raised above the rest big ones (white)…

    …that are unnecessary but inevitably wider in the


    front and too narrow at the back making the tonal
    register still very wide too.
    Nature designs with Golden ratio and Fractal symmetry

    human hand is not exception. the tips of comfortably opened fingers de-
    scribe a simple spiral arc and the thumb is known to have the widest move-
    ment. so it can be placed on two front rows (places) on that golden ratio
    arc.

    next row is for the index and pinkie fingers and finally on the back row
    there are two places for the middle and ring fingers. as a result thus we
    have four comfortable rows of possible finger positions.

    conventional piano keyboard is nothing like that. it is just two groups of


    differently shaped rectangular figures mostly so the one with the smaller
    (black) keys is somehow distributed to fit almost evenly across the other…
    almost! it is also raised above the other group otherwise its keys could not be
    pressed without affecting the adjacent keys.

    because of those two groups of keys this keyboard also has two center keys
    of symmetry instead of uniform symmetry. pretty ugly i would say.
    ALTERNATIVE PIANO KEYBOARD DESIGNS

    the need for a comfortable and better designed piano keyboard is obvious.

    ?
    ALL THOSE KEYBOARDS STILL MISS SOMETHING

    pianists should know…


    of course i started with the conventional keyboard as
    a reference and after considering some crucial things
    mentioned i came up with this uniform design:

    not bad… i mean, it is better than the standard piano keyboard


    and has some undeniable advantages but still is not that symmet-
    rically uniform as it needs to be.

    besides there is still the problem with the min-


    imum key widths so the fingers could freely
    access the convex areas and slopes.

    i knew the features i wanted implemented in the


    ultimate piano keyboard design and did not
    satisfy with partial solutions.
    i wanted each key to be adjacent to the next in the
    chromatic 12–tone scale and at the same time to be
    adjacent also to the key after the next. their design
    should have been smooth and also to have convex
    surface. that would lead to very useful features
    for the performer.

    then the keyboard had to have equal uniformity as


    the Jankò keyboard but i went even further: wanted
    to make such a design so all the keys to lie in one
    virtual plane. it was absolutely unsubstantial the
    rows of keys to be in cascade layout configuration!

    that may seem pretty convenient at a


    first glance so the keys could not be
    flat, not at all! i had to implement the
    ability for smooth transitions between
    chords and phrases in each basic di-
    rection or movement of the hand and
    the fingers during performance.

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