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in reply to @tati's post:
how many notes do you really need to make interesting music, i wonder
i mean a drum kit has way less things than a guitar but also they're more distinct sounding since it's more like multiple instruments than one instrument with many notes
could you do a little synth with like... 16 notes played across a computer keyboard? would the music be interesting? idk shit about music tho
i wonder as well!! i might try to make a little synth and see what i can do with it
pieces playing on a single note (or octaves across a single note) have been done and they can be quite fascinating! you play all your cards on dynamics, rhythm and such.
Here's an example of an eleven movement piece for piano written for a single note! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIs3jechQ_E
a violin has infinite notes, that's way too many :3
how is that possible wouldn't the finite surface area bound the amount of notes it can physically play? i don't really know how they work tho
just as there are infinite numbers on the line between 0 and 1, there are infinite notes between any two points on the unfretted strings of the violin :3
notes sound nice together when they're a "nice" ratio of frequency, like 3/2 rather than 343/200. but perception is logarithmic, so for consecutive notes to sound "equally spaced" their frequencies have to be exponentially spaced.
this presents an optimization problem that is popularly solved by defining an "octave" of twelve notes. each subsequent octave is 2x apart, and each note is 2^(1/12) apart
but remember the fractions? of those 12 exponentially-equally-spaced notes, seven have a really nice ratio. that's why you have white and black keys. the five black ones are more dissonant with the white ones (speaking super roughly and not even venturing into the area that is "keys that aren't C".)
but that power of two isn't so great a perceptual distance. 88/12 notes gives you just over five octaves on a piano, which kind of covers the gamut of the songs you might want to play. the highest notes and the lowest are rare flares, extremes, but a typical song might dance between the middle three octaves.
no idea why they arrived on 88 specifically but that, tragically, became the number to settle on. a piano without 88 keys is like an alphabet without Q or X or Z
well it depends on a lot of things!
Western music is divided in 12 notes per octave, and even small ranges like two octaves, which is the range of a recorder or the average vocal range of most people, is about 25 notes!
Polyphonic instruments (aka instruments that can play more than one note at once) are limited by the way they're constructed, but they are designed to allow for multiple notes to make the instrument versatile. The piano in particular takes the cake with 88 keys (7 octaves) but this was, much like in today's inventions, a race to improve it from the original models that only had 49 keys! https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/instruments/piano/why-pianos-have-88-keys/
Instruments are, after all, just inventions of people who craft them for their purposes, and I figure that number of note go up is a pretty good reason to claim the keyboards you make are the best and totally worth the price tag!
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