Musical Typing (Part Two)

One can only think about letters on a piano so long without eventually reversing the process and wondering about notes on a keyboard. After all, what did I establish first on a piano keyboard? There weren't enough keys to do an efficient layout of all the special symbols. There are 88 keys on an ordinary piano. There are 26 letters on a keyboard plus 30 symbols and numbers. That's 56 keys not counting the special ones. Digital pianos are made with as few as 61.

It's also possible one could be much, much faster on a keyboard than on a piano, since your hands don't have to move up and down the scale. The biggest difference between the two is that a keyboard only gets one letter typed a a time, and on a piano you can play as many as ten notes simultaneously! In other words, playing music on a keyboard has the opposite problem of typing on a piano.

The possibilities are endless, but the implementation eludes me. The number pad and special keys would make a good bass section. You could hold them down while playing the letters at a breakneck speed, but that would require three hands. However, the benefit of a keyboard layout is the speed at which you can type. So what if you simply composed special music that was meant to be played on such a keyboard? Notes that come so fast you don't notice the fact they only come one at a time. What if you could play music as fast as this?

Or not, that's a little too fast for all those notes and they just kind of start to blur into a loud noise, but if there were less notes? Brilliant!

The easiest way to come up with a simple tonal keyboard layout would be to reverse the process of putting letters on a piano. I'd do something like this:

This gives us a total of four and a half octaves, without using the numbers or F1-12. To get half steps one would use the shift key, just like to get capitals. So if a is middle C then A is C#, and so on up the scale. It would make playing in different keys a pain, but who needs to? Just set your music making program to automatically update the tones. Of course, the music making program is the big missing factor in all of this...

But no matter! I'm sure someone will figure it out. And when you do, let me know, so I can hear the wonderful sound of music following my fingers rapid typing. Imagine how cool that would be, if you used the keyboard to type with but wrote music as you went along. Mixing up keyboards may not be practical, but it sure is fun!

Musical Typing (Part One)

"The more I think about it, the more I realize that the layout of a typical keyboard may be completely off. I think a keyboard like a piano might be much more efficient."

I sat munching idly on the last of my salad as my dad continued to talk about his new typing technique. Once incorrectly diagnosed with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome we'd since come to realize he actually had something known as Repetitive Stress Injury.  It causes incessant typing to be difficult, and repetitive clicking of a mouse almost impossible. He uses an automatic mouse clicking software, but there's not much solution to typing for a programmer. Lack of a proven solution doesn't keep us from discussing, or designing, new, outlandish, and even absurd ideas.

Let me make it clear; dinner table conversations are a great breeding ground for Ideas. Wherever you are, and whoever it is who's sitting at the head of the table, if you sit back and listen with your mind wide open Ideas will crawl in and wake you up with their potential. My dad's speculation on the proper layout of keyboards had brought images and theories into my head that I could not get out. I was impatient for dinner to be done, so that I could sit at the piano with a roll of masking tape and a sharpie marker and work out what a keyboard would look like in such a format. 

Enter, Shift, Space

It was more difficult than I first supposed. The first problem that presented itself was the lack of special keys like space, enter, shift, alternate, etc. I immediately decided that the keypad on the right of an ordinary keyboard, the number pad, arrow keys, etc, would have to remain identical. However, a piano has something keyboards don't; pedals. The three pedals on a standard piano became space, shift, and enter. This only left the numbers and their corresponding symbols, ctrl, alt. caps lock, tab, esc, and F1-12 to be accounted for, beside the letters.One way to take care of them would be to use a pedal board, such as are seen on an organ.

Piano typing based on a standard keyboard layout.

My first layout was very basic. The home row of both hands went at the end of the keyboard, the bottom row on the inside of that, and the top row on the black keys.  The black keys are poorly situated, and I left several blank as a result. Ideally one would have to make a special keyboard that alternate white and black keys. This resulted in have several "positions" such as on a violin. If one were to construct such a keyboard I think a split down the middle to clearly separate the right and left hands would be beneficial.

One of the big differences between piano playing and typing is that on piano you are accustomed to using both hands at once. Attempting to actually type on my makeshift piano keyboard confused me badly, as I kept forgetting where the letters were. One would become more efficient with practice, of course, but if the letters were written out as notes I'd have no difficulty, as I sight-read and touch-type with equal ease. This leads us into an entirely new line of inquiry...

What If we used music notation as a writing system?