by ad8e on 8/19/23, 10:49 PM with 61 comments
You can play without knowing any music theory. Hit arbitrary notes with the rhythm you want, and the pitches will work. Not understanding the buttons is fine. Even rolling your elbow around your keyboard is fine.
If you are a musician and press the wrong key while playing a song, it will still fit. It will sound like you made an intelligent, conscious choice to play another note, even though you know in your heart it was an accident. Beginner jazz musicians rejoice.
It's not an AI making choices for you; it's just a very elegant interface. What makes this possible is several new discoveries in psychoacoustics about how harmony works. While a piano lays out notes in pitch space, this keyboard is able to lay out notes in consonance space. When you play random notes, they tend to be "close together" on the physical keyboard. Distance on the keyboard maps well to distance in consonance space, so those random notes are close together in consonance space and sound good together.
According to Miles Davis, a "wrong" note becomes correct in the right context. If you try to play a wrong note, the purple buttons you press will automatically land you in the right context, even if you don't know what that context is yourself. So you can stumble your way through an improv and the keyboard will offer the right notes without needing you to think about it.
Harmonic consonance of chords can be read directly off the numbers in the keyboard, which implies that these numbers are a good language to think about music with. It doesn't take years of training, just reading the rules. The key harmony insight that you can do on this keyboard, and not on a piano, is to add frequencies linearly (like 400 Hz + 300 Hz). The reason this matters is that linear combinations of frequencies are a major factor of harmony, in lattice tones. So to see how dissonant or consonant a chord is, you want to check how distant it is from a sum or arithmetic progression. On a piano, to do the same, you'd have to memorize fractional approximations of 2^(N/12), then add and subtract these fractions, which is very difficult. For example, how far is 6/5 + 4/3 from 5/2? Hard to say! But if denominators are cleared, it's easy to compare 36 40 45: they're off by 1 from an arithmetic progression. This also applies to overlapping notes, not just chords. Having all the keys accessible on a piano is very convenient, but this translation layer of 2^(N/12) approximation + fractional arithmetic makes it hard to see harmony beyond the pairwise ratios.
The subset of playable songs is different from a piano, which means that songs in your existing piano repertoire will snip off some notes. Hardware for thumb keys would fix this, so you could play your existing piano songs in full, plus other songs a piano can't play. I don't have such hardware so I haven't implemented this. The other way is to have two keyboards and a partner.
The remaining issue is that there is no sheet music in just intonation. Unfortunately, I have had no success in finding piano sheet music in a common, interpretable format. So while I do have a converter from 12 equal temperament to just intonation, there are no input files to use it with...
by zengid on 8/21/23, 9:26 PM
That being said I have a few constructive critiques.
First is I wouldn't say it's intuitive. Having the harmonics ascending from right-to-left breaks my brain. Wait, on second look they are kind of scattered about in a somewhat random way? Why are 5 and 3 so far from each other? I might like it if this was laid out in a lattice or some kind of regular structure. I don't doubt that with practice and reading I could learn it but, IMO, if I have to read an instruction manual I'm already checked out..
Second, there needs to be some kind of indication at where I'm at in terms of the internal state of the multiplied ratios. So if I've stacked on 3 consecutive 2/3, the only feedback I get is when I hit a note.. and I might forget where I'm at in the "pitch space". You could just have a simple "stack" at the top that shows the last applied ratio, and maybe the final product or quotient next to it.
by cscheid on 8/21/23, 10:40 PM
A small suggestion: when you press the purple buttons, it would be neat to see the green numbers change by the multiplier (or have an option to do so). This would let you easily see parts of the keyboard transpose correctly vs not, and what new pitches you get access to. Even sweeter would be a quick animation to show "where the numbers went".
I would also like to be able to have the purple buttons be active only when pressing the keys, so that I could quickly modulate up a just fourth and back. Having to remember where I am in the modulation state is a bit much, and very different from typical musical instruments.
But I've been playing with this for a good while, trying to recreate basic stuff like V7 -> I etc and it's very cool, thanks again.
by aidenn0 on 8/21/23, 8:10 PM
by zokier on 8/21/23, 9:06 PM
Of course the instrument having hidden state makes all this far more complicated. Would be neat if the key labels would also indicate the absolute note so I wouldn't need to do mental arithmetic here.
by HPsquared on 8/21/23, 8:16 PM
by Pr0ject217 on 8/21/23, 8:54 PM
It would be awesome to be able to record the notes to a sequencer, and then play them back, optionally sending via Web MIDI API[1], so that one could control an external synthesizer or VST.
[1]https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_MIDI_AP...
by dekhn on 8/22/23, 1:17 AM
I also like his drone work and have lots of fun with paulstretch.
by jcpst on 8/21/23, 8:45 PM
by ktbwrestler on 8/21/23, 7:32 PM
by elric on 8/22/23, 8:32 AM
by dsp_person on 8/21/23, 10:13 PM
by fritzo on 8/21/23, 9:51 PM
by IndySun on 8/20/23, 3:33 PM
by quickthrower2 on 8/20/23, 5:39 AM
by 93po on 8/22/23, 12:30 PM
by msephton on 8/21/23, 9:47 PM
by tvararu on 8/23/23, 11:00 AM
by wwarner on 8/21/23, 11:20 PM