I've been a pianist for over 16 years now. A personal hobby of mine is to shut my eyes and play blind while practicing. As I've discovered over the years, I'm remarkably precise in hitting the correct notes in spite of this, and furthermore, I've discovered that in most pieces, it is only necessary for me to look at the keys during 10-20% or less of the time. And that's usually only if there happen to be a lot of wide jumps.
I don't know if this is just me or if other pianists experience similar precision in blind playing. I should ask around. For one thing, I know that part of this must factor into the fact that the strength in my memorization capabilities - in everything piano and otherwise - lies in spatially-based memory techniques. That is to say, I'm a fast typer and can memorize all the countries in the world and all the elements on the Periodic Table mostly because of spatial memory skills. But everyone's brain is wired differently. Ergo, my question of how frequently this experience shows up in other pianists.
At any rate, the picture above made me think about what might happen if we were to a color a keyboard so. If you'll notice, there are only 4 colors to spread over 7 different notes per scale. (Non-musicians: the notes in music are A - G, which then repeat. One scale is essentially one cycle of these notes.)
So now the question is: If I were to play on this piano, would I get confused? Or because of spatial muscle memory, would it make only a minimal difference, if at all? When I play by sight, do I only watch the black keys anyway to get my bearings (a logical presumption) ?
... Dunno! Maybe we can color a keyboard some day.
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