Saturday, October 31, 2009

The Chromatone

The piano, is in many ways unintuitive. The fact that the arrangement of the keys is not in consistent intervals makes it a harder instrument to play. What do I mean? I am speaking of the fact that there are black and white keys. If you were to play all the white keys in a row from C, the intervals would not be consistent: it would be whole step, whole step, half step, whole step...etc.

This makes it fairly difficult to transpose songs into different keys. If I wanted to play a song so that it is easier to sing, I might need to lower or raise the key of the song. Doing so involves shifting all of the notes up or down a certain amount. But since the keys on a piano are arranged irregularly, shifting notes becomes more difficult to do.

The Chromatone is a new piano design, in which the keys are arranged in equal distance. It's not just a flat keyboard though: there are 5 sets of keys that are arranged on top of each other. Take a look, it's quite interesting:

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