Inventing Musical Instruments in Worldbuilding

I've pondered for years about inventions within worldbuilding. Whenever I saw a piano in a fantasy world, I thought to myself "What are the odds that theirs would look exactly like ours?" Well, I've set out on this journey and found out. But first, I would like to outline the reason why I thought about this.

Different Worlds, Different Histories

Our world has a specific sequence of inventions and discoveries in its history. Language, fire, farming, wheel, written language, printing press, firearms, the industrial revolution, radio wave-transmitting devices, computers, the internet, and many things in between, as well as before and after. Some of these would be difficult to swap the order of, for example, inventing computers before inventing written language is something I'd personally consider highly unlikely. But some other things we could swap around to make for something quite interesting. This is what the Alternate Techline trope refers to.

So the question I pose is this: What are the chances that the history of a fictional world would follow the exact same sequence as ours? Some inventions are quite complicated in their nature, requiring many previous inventions before. Others, such as the flute, for example, are so simple that it would be strange if they weren't invented.

Let's take a look at a piano to see what I mean.

Look at how otherworldly that piano appears. Different material, different layout of keys, ... do the keys even play the same notes as our pianos?
Piano, by WLOP.

Regarding the Piano

I'm not a historian, and I am hardly a musician, so I'll try to keep this simple. I've done some surface-level research, and while I can't guarantee everything I'll write here is correct, at least it will illustrate my point.

The history of the piano begins in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, with the invention of the water organ. This is a wind musical instrument that uses a tank of water to push air out through the pipes. The water is first pumped out of the smaller tank into a bigger one, compressing the air inside. The air will then flow out of the pipes that are opened by the musician using an array of keys. So think of it as a couple of whistles that will play their tones when open. According to my short research on this topic, after pumping the water out of the tank, the water organ could be played for roughly 30 minutes before you'd have to pump the water out again. I could go on with how this turns into a pipe organ with bellows etc., but we're inventing a piano, and that's a string instrument. What this invention gave us though is something we'd take for granted: the idea that you could play music by pressing down keys.

Source

So what's next? Well, clavichord and harpsichord. Clavichord is a string instrument played with keys that strike its strings with tiny blades. Meanwhile, a harpsichord is a string instrument played with keys that are used to move a plectrum, plucking the strings (sort of like when one plays the guitar). In their designs, they already resemble a piano, but you might be wondering... why are the key colors reversed? Well, I'll let this fellow explain it to you, and instead move on to the question of the keys' arrangement.

Clavichord (left) and harpsichord (right)

Why are the keys on the clavichord, harpsichord, and piano arranged the way they are? I'm sure you know what I mean, it's one of the most iconic aspects of a piano: an array of 7 repeating white keys, with black keys in between the first two pairs and the last three pairs of keys. Let's begin with the fact that each note is a soundwave, with its pitch being determined by the frequency of the wave (measured in Hertz). The notes with frequencies that are halves or doubles of each other sound similar, which is why we tend to label them as the same note, like C for example. This is wonderfully displayed on this website's table, and it's also interactive so you can hear what I mean.

Why did we choose these 12 notes specifically? This video explains it nicely, I'd sum it up as a set of cultural preferences combined with a need for some regularity between the sounds used, and some strong tone combinations that we really wanted in our music: perfect fourth, perfect fifth, minor third, major third, and then some. Of course, that's not the only way to lay out the tones used. There are scales with 5 tones, and there are scales with 43 tones, or perhaps even more. As for why they are laid out the way they are, ... I can only guess it's because arranged as they are, the white notes can flawlessly play C major and A minor scales. Or because the black keys cover the pentatonic scale. Or because it lets the pianist do a tone slide called glissando. And maybe the black keys are higher than the others to let you do a pentatonic glissando.

Let's get back to the piano. How do we get from harpsichord and clavichord to piano? Well, all of them are string instruments, but they move their strings in different ways. The clavichord strikes them with tiny blades, harpsichord plucks them. Piano uses small hammers to strike the notes. I'd imagine it's similar to what Cimbalom does, but a professional will probably explain to me how those are very different in a way I couldn't figure out during my minor research into the topic.

I'm gonna omit the pedals for now, because I don't feel like researching those.

To Invent an Instrument

So to summarize, in order to explain the existence of a piano in a fictional world, we needed an explanation for the invention of:

• The keys (water organ),
• The strings in a box played with small hammers (cimbalom, or harpsichord and clavichord if we count other methods of striking the strings),
• The preference for composing in a 12-tone scale,
• The need to distinguish the major/minor scale keys from each other (results in lightly colored piano keys)
• The need to play these in quick succession for a glissando,
• The need to play the pentatonic scale as well, and the possibility of playing it as a glissando (sets the black keys apart by making them shorter than the white keys, and placing them higher than the white keys for easier glissando).

There could be more factors, but now you probably see what I mean. Meanwhile, here's what you need to invent a drum:

• A surface that can be hit to produce a distinct sound,
• And something to strike this surface with, such as a stick, a metal rod, a grainy material like sand, or even a hand. 

I feel like I'm overtly reductive here, but what I wanted to say with this final statement is that a piano is harder to invent than a drum. There could be a fictional world where a piano is invented before drums are, of course, but it's highly unlikely.

I'm gonna choose to believe that what we've seen in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom's trailer #3 is Zelda sitting in front of a magical piano. It's unclear, but the pose suggests that's the fact to me, and I liked this shot.

The reason why I am writing this article is to sort of summarize my attempt at reinventing a piano for my worldbuilding. While it is possible to change some parameters, making a piano that's "my own" feels like it's not worth the hassle.That's about it for today. Thank you for reading my somewhat disorganized and under-researched notes, and I wish you all a wonderful day!