Do pianists and gamers type faster?

No controlled study we found compares pianists or gamers with other people on speed on an ordinary QWERTY keyboard. The research that comes closest is about a new piano layout, which is not the keyboard most people use. So the evidence does not support either claim, and it does not rule either one out. Our typing research guide covers the wider evidence.

No controlled study shows pianists or gamers type faster

We found no controlled study that compares pianists or gamers on QWERTY typing speed. We ran web searches for controlled comparisons. The results were piano-based text entry, small lab studies of game controllers, and product reviews of gaming keyboards. None of these tests whether skill on an instrument or in a game makes someone faster on a standard keyboard.

A 2013 headline overstated what the piano research tested

The Max Planck Society headlined its release on the piano research with the line "Pianists play their instruments as fast as experienced typists on a QWERTY keyboard" ¹. The research behind it is PianoText, a layout that assigns English letters and words to piano notes and chords. Its authors report an achievable rate of over 80 words per minute ². They say that this rate parallels the rates of expert QWERTY typists ³.

That is a claim about the new layout. It shows that a piano can be used to type at expert rates, which is an achievement in its own right. It does not show that pianists are faster on the keyboard they already use, because pianists were not compared with other people on QWERTY.

In the one typing comparison we found, formal training made little difference

The closest comparison of typists is a 2016 study of everyday typing with 30 participants ⁴. In a transcription task, touch typists entered text at 57.8 words per minute ⁵. Typists who had never learned touch typing averaged 58.93 words per minute in the same task ⁶. The two groups are close, so formal training did not clearly produce faster typists in that task. The study did not measure musical or gaming practice, and it is small, so treat this as one result.

The same authors say that touch typing can be learned quickly but needs deliberate training of hundreds of hours to reach the rates reported in the literature ⁷. That is a claim about the skill of touch typing, not about pianists or gamers, and it suggests that the skill is built by practice on the keyboard itself.

Gamers have no controlled typing study that we could find

The gaming side of the evidence is thinner. The studies we could find test game controllers, the speed of hitting a single key repeatedly in esports, or text entry with a controller. Those measure a different device or a different action from everyday typing. We could not read the full text of some of them. Gaming keyboards are reviewed by product sites, but those reviews are not controlled studies.

What would change the answer

A pianist or gamer who types fast may have trained hard on the keyboard, may have a stronger natural speed, or may have both. A single comparison cannot separate those, which is why the answer rests on the absence of a controlled test.

How to test it yourself

If you want to check the claim for a group you care about, run the same test for everyone:

1. Give every participant the same passage, on the same keyboard, in the same room.
2. Score each test with the same method. Our guide to how typing speed is measured explains gross and net speed.
3. Record accuracy with the speed. A fast typist with many errors is not faster in the useful sense. The typing accuracy entry defines it.
4. Compare against a group of similar age and practice, not against a single person's memory of their speed.

What to do

• If you want to type faster, practice on the keyboard you use. How to type faster covers the methods that change speed.
• If you are choosing a skill, the evidence does not show that music or gaming will improve your typing. Choose a practice that you enjoy and measure your speed directly.
• For the broader question, see whether typing speed matters, and whether touch typing is worth learning.

The other questions in this set cover whether typing speed correlates with IQ and whether typing patterns can detect Parkinson's. The full overview is on the typing speed overview.