First & foremost: the aesthetic value of a rainbow-keyed piano is immeasurable. The correspondance would be totally arbitrary, but "Red A, Orange B, Yellow C, Green D, Blue E, Indigo F, Violet G" would functionally facilitate associating which notes where, tho it might make transposition harder.

You could have varying hues for each octave.

You /could/ make the sharp/flats inbetween reflect the color combo of their neighboring natural notes, i.e. D# could be green+blue; but having the bias of parital color-blindness, (& to these colors incidentally), this isn't very appealing to me. I'd stay black.

Alternatively, I'd like to see a greyscale color scheme for the keys.
-- redundantly_redundant, Nov 16 2002

How to use color notes to learn new notes http://www.happynot...ne/color_notes.html
[thumbwax, Oct 04 2004]

Burnt to a crisp.
Stay black!
-- thumbwax, Nov 16 2002


Who's gonna break the news to Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney?
-- Amos Kito, Nov 17 2002


While the keys of most good pianos are made from hardwood (usually hornbeam) the white key tops are usually a plastic or ivory--never wood. You can still get custom-made ivory keytops from reclaimed ivory. On my piano the black keytops are made of ebony hardwood.

Certain of the Bösendorfer's have either 4 or 9 additional keys, sub-bass notes, and those keys are inverted color, tones black and semitones white. the claim is that the inverted color provides a visual cue to the pianist as to where the traditional 88 key compass ends and the sub-bass begins. Which is fine unless you play in the dark.
-- bristolz, Nov 17 2002


electric pian-ow!

Uses negative re-inforcement for teaching the pianoforte - mild electric shocks when a key is pressed at the wrong time.

(jutta - I think, in fact, that was the norm for many years when harpsichords were the prevalent form. You might say that the white, natural/black sharps were the reverse harpsichord.)
-- yamahito, Nov 17 2002


But I heard they don't use ABCDEFG in Europe. I thought it was all Do Re Mi Fa So La Te Do. But wouldn't this screw up the mental color scheme as well? Because Am is dark red, D7 is lime yellow, and C-maj is orange, plain as the nose on your face.
-- Admiral Hackbar, Nov 17 2002


One of my good friends is synaesthetic. This happens automatically for her.
-- Tabbyclaw, Apr 08 2005



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