About 80% of women pianists have hands smaller than the keyboard…
About 80% of women pianists have hands smaller than the keyboard was designed for. The subreddit's answer, at 502 points, is a campaign to get Yamaha to build narrower pianos. Nobody has pointed out that the score is the cheap thing to change, not the instrument.
What is the idea?
Give it a piece and your actual hand span; it hands back a version arranged for your hands — chords respaced, unreachable stretches redistributed between the hands or voiced down — with the melody and harmony intact.
Why would anyone bother?
The people affected are adult learners who are being told, in effect, to get bigger hands. The thread is full of them describing injuries from playing repertoire that does not fit — one poster gave themselves tendinopathy in a graded exam piece.
What is missing today?
The community's own proposed fix is a $4–5k narrow-key instrument that almost nobody will buy, and the standard advice is 'roll the chords' — an ad-hoc workaround each player reinvents alone. The score is the artifact that is trivially editable and nobody is editing it.
What makes this one different?
Do not sell an arranging tool. Sell one sentence: play the piece you actually want to play, at the hand you actually have. Scope to public-domain classical repertoire first, where both the demand and the legal position are cleanest. Cold start CN = 小红书/B站「手小 钢琴」「八度够不到」标签，以及琴童家长群; EN = the two r/piano hand-span threads (502 pts / 275 comments and 21 pts) plus the existing Donison-Steinbuhler petition community, which is a list of people who already self-identified.
What is the sharpest thing about it?
Respacing a score without wrecking the music is symbolic work on structured notation, which is exactly what current models became competent at. Until now it was a skilled human editing job done piece by piece, so nobody did it for amateurs.
What could kill it?
Purists will object that respacing changes the composer's intent, and for exam repertoire a modified version may not be accepted — so this cannot be sold as a route through ABRSM or Trinity. It also has to be genuinely musical: naive octave-splitting produces something that sounds wrong immediately, and that is a hard bar.
Who pays, and for what?
Per-piece or a small subscription, alongside the sheet-music spend these learners already have.
What is the main risk?
Must not be framed as injury prevention or treatment — it can say a piece fits a given span, not that it will stop you getting hurt; anyone in pain should be pointed to a teacher or clinician.
What did real people actually say?
Verbatim from the public sources linked above, not paraphrased: “There's a lot of repertoire that, if I wanted to play them, I'd have to roll most of the chords or practice certain passages very minimally so as to avoid injury.” — reddit-post “No amount of practice can make me play octaves well enough since I physically can't play octaves over the keys without tension.” — reddit-post “I played a Gershwin piece for the Trinity Grade 8 Exam and gave myself digit minim tendinopathy in my left pinky.” — reddit-post
How much work is it?
about two months of work
Where does the evidence come from?
https://old.reddit.com/r/piano/search?q=%22Why+is+there+no+push+for+major+companies%22&restrict_sr=on https://old.reddit.com/r/piano/search?q=%22Narrower+keyboards+need+to+be+popularized%22&restrict_sr=on
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