Keyboard^2

Overview

We made a piano type! Our program turns midi input from an electric keyboard into regular computer typing, with an emphasis on musicality and ease of use.

Design

Our key-mapping uses chord triads to type vowels and single notes to type consonants. To make the typing sound musical, we assigned the keys so that letters which frequently appear next to each other sound nice when played together (by making them part of the same chord or using a chord progression). Other musical features included:

Playing legato for words, with automatic spacing during silences
Playing louder to type capitals

Technical features

To make things more user friendly, we also added:

Auto-backspacing (deleting the most recent word in one press)
Support for the sustain pedal
Full customisability, including custom chord shortcuts

Challenges we ran into

We're all maths students, so writing code for an application like this was definitely a new challenge! Working out the best way to register a chord input vs single notes especially took a lot of trial and error. A more practical challenge was getting a full size keyboard to and from the department building... (thank you Uber)

What's next?

We're currently working on polishing up our code and making this easy to download, as we'd love for anyone with an electric piano to be able to use this. In the future we'd like to make a version which works off audio input, so acoustic pianos (or maybe even other instruments) could be used too.