Deducing Musicians Hands

Credit to Science of logical reasoning

Its a lot so just jump into it:

Pianists:

Pianist will have on their left and right hand a curved last bone at the middle finger toward the ring finger and they will have used of finger tips depending on how much they play:

7 years pianist with unregular playing now

First picture is the left hand and second one is the right hand. As you can see the middle finger is bend into the direction towards the ring finger. Note that some people have that condition too that dont play piano. I have not found out why they have it but try to use some context and you might like personality and try to combine it to find out if it is likely that the person plays piano. A good indicated that they actually play piano is that the condition is on both hands. People that dont play piano normally have the condition only at one hand.  Pianists will also usually have a thicker connection between the thumb and palm as also seen on the pictures.

Saxophone:

People that play the saxophone will tend to have a crooked thumb. This condition is as a before with pianist also found at people that dont play the piano. Mostly its people who are hyper flexible that get the condition if they dont play the saxophone. Again context is the key. Deduce with other clues and you might be getting on the right track:

2 years training, playing one to two hours a day

As you see the thumb is bend backwards making a curve. I can be more or less and is caused by people that press with the thumb on something a lot.

Clarinet:

Clarinet players have usally a mark on the right thumb. Its due to that they rest their instrument with a thumbrest on their thumb. Which causes a mark / callus to form on it. If they use a neck strap the mark is not visible as much and turns into just a bit thicker skin. Might be “bumpy”. After training they can also have a round mark on the right hand index finger. Wrong playing of the clarinet can also cause a red mark on the index finger, on the side toward the thumb:

6 years of training, one to two hours a day

There you can see the mark on the thumb under the knuckle. You can also the the mark on the ring finger which is caused by wrong handling of the instrument.

Here is the same hand again but after he trained. As you can see the marks are very visible and red.

Here is also the hand from the inside after training where you can see on the index finger a round mark because of the training. (Sorry I forgot that picture in the first version)

7 years clarinet training, 2-3h a week to sometimes 6-9h a week

Here is a person that uses a neck strap as you can see there is just a little visible bump above the knuckle at the inside between thumb and index finger. Here is the other hand that does not have that bump:

Stringed Instrument:

Advanced string players tend to have calluses on their fingertips as seen here:

20 years guitarist, training 15 to 20 hours a week

If they recently trained with the instrument they will have straight marks on their finger tips as seen here:

Depending on the instrument they will go in different directions:

Violin or Viola:

Lines as seen on the above picture. They go from bottom left to top right.

Cello:

Lines the opposite as seen above. They go from top left to bottom right

Guitar:

Lines go straight across the finger tips or in a very slight angly from bottom left to top right like the violin but in a very flat angle.

Depending on how hard they trained the marks can last up to 40 min:

05 min – mildly visible ,

07 min – barely visible ,

10 min – still visible in good lit areas,

12 min – now only visible on 3 fingers (index, middle and ring),

20 min – seeing it on the index finger (good), barely on the others,

25 min – barely visible on middle and ring finger and still visible on index finger,

28 min – barely visible only at index finger now,

30 min – almost gone at all fingers index is still a bit of a visible mark,

35 min – only visible at the index finger with good light and close looking,

37 min – all gone

*Simulated with pressing on a violin (because it was broken)*

Thats it for my study. It took some time and a lot of people to be able to do this. I am really happy with the results as I can show to most or basically everything at lest one example picture which was important to me. Again here: Thanks to everyone who took part and helped me to make this as accurate as possible. If you have anything to add please hit me up at:  [email protected]

Thanks for reading

-Sol