Typing Your Way to Better Music

The QWERTY keyboard is a tricky interface for music-making, but many inventors have come up with equally tricked-out ways to overcome its limitations. Here are a few of my favorites.

I’ve long been a fan of Mixman, which turned typing into synchronized grooves. But simply triggering samples doesn’t allow much expressivity, so the company eventually designed its own input controller, the DM²:

You can trigger samples from the QWERTY keyboard, but the light-up buttons on the Mixman DM² controller are much more fun. (Source: Create Digital Music.)

Down in the mad-scientist hall at NAMM a few years back, I spent 15 minutes talking with Leon Gruenbaum, inventor of the hippest musical computer keyboard ever, the Samchillian Tip Tip Tip Cheeepeeeee:

All together now: “Tip Tip Tip Cheeepeeeee!”

The keys on the Samchillian transmit relative MIDI notes rather than absolute ones, which means that every time you type, say, a K, the pitch on a connected synthesizer will go down by two semitones. A comma might shift the pitch up a perfect fifth. That makes it easy to play furious arpeggios, as Gruenbaum demonstrated.

Like Mixman, Israeli design student Eitan Shefer has taken the Samchillian performance-typing concept and created a slick new controller, which you can see in action here.

The new Samchillian.

QWERTY Please

But the standard QWERTY keyboard still has potential. How about velocity-sensitive keys on which typing harder would shift letters to bold or ALL CAPS? Creative Labs did something similar by bonding a piano-style keyboard to a QWERTY one in the Prodikeys. At the other extreme, there’s the astonishing Optimus, in which each key has its own OLED display.

All of which makes me wonder: Is the DVORAK keyboard layout inherently more musical?