Piano Man
In 1998, a pianist called Christopher Donison wrote that ‘one can divide the world into roughly two constituencies’: those with larger hands, and those with smaller hands. Donison was writing as a male pianist who, due to his smaller than average hands, had struggled for years with traditional keyboards, but he could equally have been writing as a woman. There is plenty of data showing that women have, on average, smaller hands than
men, and yet we continue to design equipment around the average male hand as if one-size-fits-men is the same as one-size-fits-all.
This one-size-fits-men approach to supposedly gender-neutral products is disadvantaging women. The average female handspan is between seven
and eight inches, which makes the standard forty-eight-inch keyboard something of a challenge. Octaves on a standard keyboard are 7.4 inches wide, and one study found that this keyboard disadvantages 87% of adult
female pianists. Meanwhile, a 2015 study which compared the handspan of 473 adult pianists to their ‘level of acclaim’ found that all twelve of the pianists considered to be of international renown had spans of 8.8 inches or
above. Of the two women who made it into this exalted group, one had a handspan of nine inches and the other had a handspan of 9.5 inches.
The standard piano keyboard doesn’t just make it harder for female pianists to match the level of acclaim reached by their male colleagues: it also affects their health. A range of studies carried out on instrumentalists during the 1980s and 90s found that female musicians suffered ‘disproportionately’ from work-related injuries, and that keyboard players were among those ‘most at risk’. Several studies have found that female pianists run an approximately 50% higher risk of pain and injury than male pianists; in one study 78% of women compared to 47% of men had developed RSI.
It was while Christopher Donison was practising the coda of the G minor Chopin Ballade on his Steinway concert grand ‘for about the thousandth time’, that he had the thought that led to his designing a new keyboard for people with smaller hands. What if it wasn’t that his hands were too small, but that the standard keyboard was too large? The result of this thought was the 7/8 DS keyboard, which, Donison claimed, transformed his playing.
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