Trying to play an isomorphic piano (2022) [video]
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It's a stringed instrument with numerous strings that are uniformly spaced a whole tone apart. It also has numerous frets. So you play on a grid.
There are numerous videos of various people making amazing performances on the harpejji.
They caught the attention of Stevie Wonder, who uses them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harpejji
It is an electric instrument played with touch technique: you just fret the note by hammering on it with a finger, like right hand tapping on an electric guitar.
Unlike most electric guitars, the harpejji has a separate pickup for each string. Furthermore, it electrically senses the contact between the string and fret. So any unfretted string is not heard, even if it happens to be vibrating. This gives the instrument superb clarity, like hitting keys on a synthesizer. All the players demonstrating the instrument have good articulation, free of unwanted sounds.
Harpejjis have black and white markings on the fretboard to identify C major scale notes. When you look at a horizontal strip of this (across the strings) it is reminiscent of the isomorphic piano.
"What was wrong with the people who came up with this layout"
to
"These asymmetries are more blessing than curse".
To add a little context. To the layman a piano keyboard looks pretty regular, there is only this slight oddity with a block two and a block of three black keys.
For the player on the other hand this slight irregularity makes almost everything kind of irregular in a sense. For example if you play all the all white key triads you get mostly minor and major triads - mostly because one of them is diminished chord. Or if you look at the patterns of black and white keys when you move a certain chord type through all the keys - it's a mess.
But it's a mess you can memorize and as a reward you will never get lost.
Jankó was a more than competent pianist himself, and had thought about these issues. You can reach everything you can on a normal keyboard and many things you can't, and the multiple ways to play the same tone gives plenty of ways to solve fingering challenges as well. The problem is no one is used to it, and no one wants to start out with it since instruments with the layout are extremely rare.
Which is to say, it isn't a surprise that music co-evolved with a particular instrument might be difficult on some other one; it's the expected, perfectly normal, perfectly predictable result, and isn't really a criticism of the new instrument. Unless you're willing to equally criticize the conventional instrument for all the music it can't play very well, but then, even so, it's a very symmetric criticism in the end and doesn't amount to much.
I sympathize. I wouldn't be able to play upright bass if I had to support the instrument myself.
I thought this keyboard layout might make the pianist's hand-span one tone wider, but unfortunately, that wouldn't be the case. A normal piano spaces its black keys further apart than its white keys. On my digital piano, an isomorphic layout would bring the raised keys about 4mm closer together, which seems unplayable - but leaving the octave span unchanged would win those 4mm back.
It would be much more difficult to reposition your hands without looking at them, but changing the texture of the white keys and black keys might help.
My feeling is that isomorphic instruments are ultimately superior, but the set of instruments used by professional musicians is pretty much fixed at this point (at least "classical" ones, because classical supposedly implies existing traditions).
A recent example (recent as in 1850s) of an "isomorphic <existing instrument>" would be a chromatic button accordion, eg here (specifically a bayan in this video):
https://youtube.com/watch?v=eDFFUIGoBUc
I feel like the callibre of music played on CBAs is much higher than on diatonic- or piano-accordions. I kind of wish an isomorphic version of a piano had become the main form of that instrument somewhere in the world (as the bayan did for accordions in Russia), since I feel like it might have similarly improved on what music is playable.
On a related note (hehehe), I posted this comment recently about my own use of the isomorphic layout used on bayans (including a video) .. though I'm not a trained musician:
You lose some idiomatic guitar vocabulary, but if you don't care about that you gain the ability to construct your own chord voicings much more easily, and only need to remember one fingering for each chord instead of three.
Isomorphic is more logical and so easier to explain, but you still should be teaching the circle of 5ths to students. Once someone understands the circle of 5ths the layout of the conventional keyboard makes logical sense as well (it won't be as intuitive but the logic makes sense).
I tune in all fourths as well. For me it has made a huge difference since I made the jump some years ago. Putting voicings, patterns, etc., into muscular memory is faster and a lot less work. For my purposes, it makes the instrument more intuitive with a better ear-hand connection. Even very advanced players trip on the G-B strings oddity (with things like playing a fast, angular melody on different string sets, without preparation, for example).
It might have some minor advantages, but there are probably also disadvantages: this doesn't help you learn the different modes (minor, dorian, etc.). Instead, they might be hindered by your muscle memory.
So, for comping it can shine, but for normal music, probably a disadvantage. I certainly don't see any advantage that should make everybody switch.
It seems to me that the standard piano layout (and the standard musical notation, which is basically piano tablature) is the result of cruft being added over time rather than refactoring to better express the underlying concepts.
.. these notes seem to work well for our gloomy church chants, let's call them A, B, C, D, E, F, G
.. hmm, maybe focusing on a more cheerful mode is better, so obviously we'll tell everyone to start from C rather than A
.. it seems that some of our intervals are roughly double the other intervals, let's add in the extra notes as C#, D#, F#, G#, A#, we won't bother telling the kids what happened to E# and B# though 'cause that's too hard to explain
.. 12tet incoming, we'll just retune our existing instruments slightly
Instruments and music theory are largely based around 12TET nowadays, but it seems like it's tacked on top of something else.
That depends on the constraints. Today's keyboard is a good compromise even today. You can compromise different things, but a full micro-tonal keyboard isn't enough better as to be worth it for most things and once you agree that you must compromise the only question is what. A 9:8 or 10:9 major second are both of rare use and so you probably just agree to get rid of them. The only hard part is 3rds, would you accept how bad they sound in a the current system (in which case a true 5th and a equal tempered 5th are close enough), or try to divide the thirds somehow.
A chromatic button accordion has other compensating advantages but I don’t find either one easier overall. They’re just different. You get better with practice.
Why is it helpful or interesting to have an isomorphic piano?
And what does "isomorphic" even mean here? As a casual piano player and techie, I can guess that it means that each lower key and each upper key are equidistant so that you don't have sometimes alternating raised/lowered (C, C#) and lower/lower (E, F) asymmetry. Is that it?