Keyboard History and logic

[Bill Kibby]

It's a BIG question! But if you want to email me, I'll do what I can, this may be a long conversation of short emails. Don't worry about maths, it's a great help, music is very logical sometimes, but it would be impossible if we didn't know our A from our B, and the odd design certainly helps us to find our way around the notes. The octave is a natural relationship, one that even animals can recognise, but as far as the division of that octave into smaller intervals is concerned, at a time in history when people around the world couldn't communicate, they still produced very similar musical scales, based on an unneven and illogical arrangement of wholetones and semitones, and it is on this so-called "natural scale" that the keyboard layout is based. Tuning it is a headache though!