from Hacker News

Typing with a Piano [video]

by leafo on 4/1/19, 8:39 PM with 61 comments

  • by Adam13531 on 4/1/19, 10:21 PM

    Hey, I'm the guy who made this! This all started from a random idea I had, but then I was tickled by the thought of becoming faster than the average typist on a piano. It all culminated with a livestream today (https://www.twitch.tv/videos/404585365) where I did typing tests for about 3 hours.

    I'll try to address the comments on here, so ask any questions you have!

  • by mastazi on 4/1/19, 10:23 PM

    It reminds me of the Michela Method which is a method of steno typing that uses a short keyboard, similar to a cut down version of a piano keyboard. It is used in the Italian Parliament to produce the official transcripts.

    Video of the stenotype machine at the Italian Senate (audio in Italian) https://youtu.be/e-z1ZAsQjio?t=18

    Wikipedia page about the writing method (unfortunately only available in Italian, you may try Google Translate) https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metodo_Michela

    How to build a Michela Stenotype machine by modifying a MIDI keyboard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9Y9jtOB7G0

    OpenSteno SW that supports various Stenotype machines including the Michela machine built using a MIDI keyboard as seen above http://www.openstenoproject.org/

  • by aasasd on 4/1/19, 10:38 PM

    Early printing telegraphs used keyboards like musical ones:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Telegraph_Keyboard.jpg

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Printing_Telegraph.jpg

    See the article for some words on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_telegraph

    > Hughes telegraph devices, which also had piano style keyboards, were very popular in France, where there were likely many more piano and harpsichord players than telegraphers.

  • by Rampoina on 4/2/19, 7:53 AM

    See http://annafeit.de/pianotext/ for another interesting take on this idea.

  • by britch on 4/1/19, 9:47 PM

    Wow pressing the key harder for upper case is very good. I would take that in a regular keyboard.

  • by rafael859 on 4/1/19, 9:26 PM

    I was surprised by how fast he was able to type, and despite the fact that it seemed like a terrible/funny idea in the beginning, the end result sounded interesting (if only space wasn't mapped to a single note, so we wouldn't hear it so often). I'm sure that you can't get much faster, but I'd like to see how good one can get after some more practice.

  • by andrewflnr on 4/1/19, 10:28 PM

    I wonder if you could get more musical sounds by considering frequency of pairs of letters as well, and tweaking the layout to put them on nice intervals like fifths, fourths and major thirds.

    Edit: apparently "bigram" is the word I was looking for instead of "pair of letters".

  • by mikecsh on 4/1/19, 9:56 PM

    Reminds me of old-school chorded keyboards[1] that allow you to type via key combinations from a small number of keys.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboard

  • by illnewsthat on 4/1/19, 9:19 PM

    Besides learning how to type with a piano, the person in the video has been live streaming his game development progress on Twitch for the past 2+ years.

    Here is the twitch channel where he broadcasts daily the game development: https://www.twitch.tv/adam13531

    Here is the game he is developing ("An online strategy game with a focus on automation"): https://play.bot.land

  • by williamdclt on 4/1/19, 10:14 PM

    This is very good! It makes me feel the same as when I started learning Vim actually :) the movement of the fingers and what happens on screen seems so uncorrelated, but you get used to it

  • by nixpulvis on 4/2/19, 2:11 AM

  • by KyleBrandt on 4/1/19, 10:34 PM

    I imagine adding the pedals as shift and/or modifier keys could make things more compact.

    3 pedals and 2 feet gives you 6 I think.

  • by nullc on 4/2/19, 1:10 AM

    The Kurzweil keyboards let you type (e.g. to enter program names) using a simple A-Z mapping to keys, with a little practice it was easy to be quite fast at entering text.

    I briefly tried to find a youtube video of someone using it, but no joy-- I guess it's too boring to watch someone type. :)

  • by afandian on 4/2/19, 9:51 AM

    Full circle, implement text-to-speech on a piano.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjtZxjEH6cM

    (if you've not seen that video, it's a little mind-bending)

  • by bartimus on 4/2/19, 11:48 AM

    Since adjacent notes don't often sound harmonious, would it be cool if you could remap your keyboard to use more harmonious notes? For example also utilizing same notes from different octaves?

  • by zwkrt on 4/1/19, 11:18 PM

    "uttering a word is like striking note on the keyboard of the imagination". Except this time in reverse!

  • by navane on 4/2/19, 7:42 AM

    Ah, I remember playing the original starcraft broodwar with a midi keyboard. About 1 hour of python coding.

  • by t3hprofit on 4/2/19, 4:34 AM

    can't tell if april fools or awesome thing. lol. definitely don't release this kind of thing on April Fools Day. Awesome idea though and I'd love to see the implementation

  • by soheil on 4/1/19, 10:53 PM

    Next make a computer keyboard sound like a piano.