Candy colored musical computer keyboard

The I figured that the best way to refine my version of the chromatic scale would be to try to use it for something. And so I have repurposed an old project, in which I had used the computer keyboard as a kind of a piano keyboard. In the new version, I assign a color to every pitch.

In the course of playing with this today, I realized I could just color the seven “white” keys with pastel colors borrowed from our old friend Roy G. Biv (Red / Orange / Yellow / Green / Blue / Indigo / Violet) — with the one notable exception that Red becomes Pink on a pastel palette.

The colors of the five “black” keys — Deep red, Brown, Deep green, Navy blue, and Purple — are chosen so as to lie between the colors of their respective white key neighbors.

The resulting keyboard is certainly more cheerful than the original. The four rows of the keyboard are tuned, from bottom to top, to the even-tempered C# major, C major, B major and A# major scales, respectively. This means that when you play on any row, the row above it contains all the appropriate sharps and flats in their proper positions.

Since the “home keys” row of ASDFGHJK… corresponds to a C natural scale, which contains only white keys, you can see the pastel rainbow laid out on that row. Interestingly, the “F” and “G” keys correspond to their actual respective pitches (you might also find it useful to remember that “K” corresponds to C above middle C).

You can get to the applet itself by clicking on the image below:



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