Why does a piano have 88 keys?
We are so locked in our ways when it comes to modern music that we often forget how easy it would be to change something that we see as conventional. Take Tool as an example. People view them as musical pioneers, which they are in a sense, but one of their main angles is to try to use unique rhythm and time signatures in their music.
Ever since he was a child, Maynard James Keenan realised that he viewed rhythm in a way which was different to a lot of other people his age. Rather than force himself to become more conventional in his approach to rhythm, he instead embraced these differences and decided to make music that was unconventional and yet doubled up as a refreshing take on traditional heavy metal.
The 4/4 time signature that we’re used to is just one convention that we subscribe to, despite the fact that we don’t need to. Our musical history is draped in these kinds of restrictions, even when you go back centuries. For instance, when you look at our approach to rhythm and musical notes, our mindset dates back a long time, when the majority of our music was strictly structured praise music.
Europe was a very precise place, and so the majority of how we made music and the rules we assigned around it were the result of logic. The notion of an octave is a great example of this. People looking at a vibrating piece of string, then worked out if you were to cut the in half you would double the speed at which it vibrated and therefore create the same note but higher. They divided that string into notes, and then we got octaves as a result.
The octaves and notes we use to write music are now strict rules that exist within all music. They are used not only in the creation of music, but also in the instruments we create. When you look at guitars, they usually have the same number of frets, depending on whether it’s an acoustic or electric guitar. Granted, the design plays a part in this, but for the most part, no guitarist would buy a model that didn’t have at least 21 frets.
The same applies to pianos, as you can get plenty of different styles and brands of piano, but a full-size one usually only comes with 88 keys. Why is this? Well, the main reason boils down to practicality.
So, why does a piano always have 88 keys?
As stated above, the main reason is practicality, but this practicality is twofold. The first reason is because if it were any bigger than 88 keys, pianos would be huge. Now, they’re the right size so that people can reach keys on both ends without having to move in their seats. If you made them bigger, people would have to move on their seats to reach the furthest keys, plus they would be incredibly hard to transport.
The other reason is because 88 keys span a range of octaves that appeal to the human ear. If we played notes higher and lower than those that are available on the piano, chances are we would barely be able to register them because of the fact they are too high or too low. It wouldn’t make sense to have any others on the instrument.
