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How many notes are on a piano?

Steinway created the 88-key piano An 88-key piano has seven octaves plus three lower notes (B, B flat and A) below the bottom C. It has 52 white keys and 36 black keys (sharps and flats), with each octave made up of seven white keys and five black keys.

classicfm.com - A standard piano has 88 keys. But why? - Classic FM

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A standard piano has 88 keys. But why?

By Maddy Shaw Roberts

A standard piano has 88 keys: 52 white and 36 black. But who decided this number would be the norm, and why?

Before the piano was invented, composers wrote a lot of music for the harpsichord, which has just 60 keys. This meant that everything they wrote was limited to the harpsichord’s five-octave range.

Then, the first piano was invented.

Around the year 1700, Bartolomeo Cristofori, a musical instrument technician from Padua, Italy, decided it was time to update the harpsichord – and he came up with a new keyboard instrument with a hammer mechanism. Cristofori was hired by the Florentine court of Grand Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici in 1688 to look after their harpsichords and, eventually, other instruments. A 1700 inventory of Medici instruments mentions an ‘arpicimbalo’ (lit. an instrument resembling a harpsichord) invented by Cristofori. The instrument had a brand-new hammer and damper mechanism, two keyboards and a range of four octaves (49 keys). Poet and journalist Scipione Maffei described it in 1711 as a ‘gravicembalo col piano, e forte’ (harpsichord with quiet and loud). It was here that the ‘pianoforte’ found its name.

Composers wanted to expand the range of their music

After word got out of Cristofori’s miraculous musical invention, composers started writing more and more music for the piano. But the instrument’s four-octave range was limiting. So, piano manufacturers designed new pianos with more keys, so that composers like Haydn and Mozart could write more challenging material for a fuller keyboard. By the time Romantic composers like Chopin and Liszt were writing music in the mid-1800s, pianos had up to seven octaves, allowing them to compose pieces with an even more ambitious range like the bafflingly virtuosic ‘La Campanella’.

Steinway created the 88-key piano

In the late 1880s, piano manufacturer Steinway created the 88-key piano. Other manufacturers followed suit, and Steinway’s model has been the standard ever since. An 88-key piano has seven octaves plus three lower notes (B, B flat and A) below the bottom C. It has 52 white keys and 36 black keys (sharps and flats), with each octave made up of seven white keys and five black keys.

Why did piano manufacturers stop at 88 keys?

Today’s composers usually write piano music that fits within the range of an 88-key model. Most piano makers also accept this as the limit, because anything outside is considered too high or low for the human ear. But there are a few exceptions. Stuart and Sons set a world record in 2018 when they created a nine-octave piano, with 108 keys. Bösendorfer sells 97-key pianos, whose nine extra keys are coloured black so the pianist can distinguish them from the standard 88. The keys are rarely used, but the extra bass strings add harmonic resonance that contributes to the rich, overall sound of the instrument. Here’s an idea of how they look on the rather grand Bösendorfer semi-concert grand piano, which has an extra four keys:

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Do pianists type differently?

Piano players can 'play words' as quickly as professional typists can type them, a new study by the Max Planck Institute of Informatics has shown.

classicfm.com - Pianists are like professional typists, says new study - Classic FM

Pianists are like professional typists, says new study

Piano players can 'play words' as quickly as professional typists can type them, a new study by the Max Planck Institute of Informatics has shown. The study created a series of musical 'sentences' that were comparable in difficulty and structure to common English words on a QWERTY keyboard, and then recorded the results of a pianist 'typing' the notes on a piano keyboard, resulting in the musical phrases being turned into English words. Antti Oulasvirta, Senior Research at the Max Planck Institute, said the results were surprising: "Without prior practice [the pianist] was able to enter text with a top speed of over 80 words per minute. This corresponds to the performance rate of a professional typist using the QWERTY keyboard." To map the QWERTY keyboard to the piano keyboard accurately, the researchers considered hundreds of common typing patterns and found the musical equivalent. For example, frequent patterns like 'th' were translated as a musical leap of a third or a fifth. Researcher Anna Feit described the technique to Phys.org: "We had to respect the note transitions and chords that occur frequently in music. No pianist can quickly play dissonant chords or very large intervals, thus our mapping had to avoid these." An additional part of the study saw an amateur pianist trained over a six-month period to use the piano keyboard to type simple correspondence - resulting in the pianist being able to type sentences at 80 words per minute. The pianist could actually type emails faster at the piano than on a QWERTY keyboard.

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