The musical keyboard, also
known as the piano keyboard is the set of adjacent depressable levers
on a musical instrument which produce notes. Many musical instruments
which have a key for each note lay them out in the standard way shown
in the graphic: the piano, harpsichord, clavichord, organ, synthesizer,
celesta, and carillon keyboards. Also, instruments such as the
xylophone which have a separate sounding part for each note lay them
out in this pattern.
The twelve notes of the
Western musical scale are laid out with the lowest note on the left;
the seven larger keys (for the "natural" notes of the C major scale: C,
D, E, F, G, A, B) jut forward, with the sharp and flat keys less
prominent. The pattern then repeats at the interval of an octave. The
arrangement of white keys with intervening, shorter black keys
representing intermediate half- steps(semitones) dates to the 15th
century. In the following centuries many improvements were made,
including a gradually increasing chromatic compass which reached five
octaves in the 18th century, and attained the current 88-key range for
the modern piano shortly after 1870. Some modern pianos have even a few
more notes, and modern synthesizer keyboards commonly have either 61,
76 or 88 keys.
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