#chording keyboard

[audientvoid]

Musical Data Entry

A thought that’s occurred during all this. What would the music sound like coming out of this kind of data entry? That of course depends on the chord map I come up with, but now I’m picturing an album with poems converted to music by way of the final chord map. 

And while we’re at it, why limit ourselves to a keyboard? Just about any instrument that can be connected to a midi controller, and has enough combinations able to be played on it (sorry drums), could be turned into a tool for data entry with the right chord map. Imagine an office at work, each with their own instruments, all tuned to an appropriate chord map. could be interesting to explore.

[audientvoid]

Musical Data Entry

I haven’t had a lot of luck finding midi keyboards with fewer than 25 keys, though I’ve found some info on how to build my own midi controller or piano keyboard. This will need a lot more research on the hardware side, but does open up some interesting options (unrelated to the reason I started this project). I started this to free up space on my desktop, and to free up my hands while at work. Using a 25 key keyboard does the opposite of that.

That said, if I use a 2 octave keyboard, and treat the keys the same regardless of octave, some chords become easier to hit. Any chord using both ends of the octave immediately becomes easier to hit when you can just jump to the next octave to catch them. 

You know, I’m looking at my computer keyboard now, and I’m fairly certain it’s not that much smaller than some small midi keyboards I’ve seen, so it might not be quite as unwieldy as I’m thinking.

[audientvoid]

Musical Data Entry

While I was looking into options, I ran across the notion of using a portion of a piano keyboard, connected to a midi controller, as the keyboard. Since midi controllers are already designed for this kind of input, it should be easy enough to modify one to do what I need. If I’m going to be using a piano keyboard as my model, then I may as well use a full octave, giving me 8 keys to work with (I’m not considering the minors at this point, though they may factor in later). that gives me 8 keys to chord with. 

If I use chords consisting of up to 4 keys, then I have 162 possible combinations, which should be enough for every key on an extended keyboard, plus most (all?) of the common key combinations normally used. This is going to require some further research though, as I don’t know off hand how easy some of those chords will be to strike, though maybe we assign the rarer keys and combos to those chords.

[audientvoid]

Musical Data Entry

Now the downside to using a chorded keyboard on a modern operating system is that you frequently need to use a “chord”, even with a regular keyboard (CTRL+C, ALT+TAB, CTRL+ALT+DEL, etc). At first I thought to solve this by having the keyboard keep track of what key is being pressed, and pausing if it recognizes one that is part of a known chord, releasing if you move on to a character combo not generally recognized. So if you hit CTRL, then it stores that, if you then hit ESC, it sends both key strokes separately, but if instead you follow it with ALT it waits for the next stroke, storing the two previous ones. This is all well and good, but common chords in the programs I run include ALT+DEL, CTRL+ALT, and others that consist of portions of longer chords. 

I could set aside one key to simply indicate that the chords entered need to be held. So if Key 1 was pressed and held, the keyboard would store the string of chords you enter, releasing them to the computer when Key 1 was released. Aside from complicating things, this also creates a problem by requiring a key that can’t be used as part of any other chord, diminishing the number of chords the keyboard is capable of using. 

Instead, I’m thinking to simply assign known key combinations to the chord map, so that a single chord would handle each of them. Might mean I’ll miss some chords and have to rebuild the chord map after I finish, but I’m okay with that.

[audientvoid]

Musical Data Entry

I’ve cycled back around to chorded keyboards again. I revisit this topic about once every 3 or 4 years, and keep expecting to see a decent commercial version available (we have been circling this concept since 1968). Since there still isn’t a good one available, I’m looking into designing my own. Here’s where I’m at right now...

Since I’ll be using a roll-your-own solution, I’ll need to figure out what chords go with what characters. Naturally the most commonly used ones should be assigned to the easiest chords to play. So for that I’ll need to come up with a keylogger so I can get the needed statistics on character frequency.