Piezo electric Janko keyboard electronic musical score construct

Sometime ago while discussing the need for a re-think of musical notation with my boss, (who happened to have a Masters in music), I was introduced to the work of Paul Von Janko, engineer, musician and the inventor of the Janko keyboard.

What did musical notation and a keyboard have in common?

Both the standard keyboard and standard musical notation are technologies that are nearly 1,000 years old, and both place an inordinate amount of strain on the user to interpret and use.

Janko attempted to fix the mechanical keyboard in the same spirit that I was attempting to 'fix' musical notation which can be a horror to read.

Complex musical scores can appear almost as hieroglyphics to the person attempting to interpretation and even after having succeeded in this task, the process must be started all over again in order to play this music in the remaining 11 keys.

This may have been fine 1,000 years ago when the world moved no faster than a horse could run but today the waste of time is monstrous and it occurred to me that there must be a better way.

The genius of Janko's design was that with it the investment spent learning a piece of music could instantly be applied without change to the remaining 11 keys!

Take for example the Maj C, (C-E-G) and Maj A, (A-C#-E). On a standard piano these are two completely different chords. Each must be learned separatly, but pick these chords out on a Jank and you'll see they have the exact same shape. Infact all Major chords do while all Minor chords share the same shape among themselves and so on.

Seeing the advantage I instantly wanted one only to discover that I couldn't buy one for love or money leaving me, like many other enthusiast, with no choice but to build one, no mean feat since a functional Janko keyboard required no fewer than 176 keys. A fully configured keyboard required 264 keys!

A velocity sensitive piano key is a complex mechanism and building even one functioning key is a task beyond most people's ability, building 176 or 264 keys utterly impossible.

There were two strategies used to overcome this. Strategy one,  build a mechanical template to fit over a standard key board. This was Janko's approach. The other more modern approach was to use standard push buttons in place of keys. You can see both approaches here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlaeSOvYB7M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuzZ3c2X5co&feature=related

I found both these to be unsatisfactory. First if the template is not pprecisely made it was clumsy and unreliable, second push buttons lacked velocity sensitivity, arequirement if theinstrument will be more than just a toy.

I solved these problems by using piezo electric sensors and I'll outline the construction and programming, (yes it's midi of course), in the following entries of this blog.

Following these I'll return to the problem of simplifying musical notation and perhaps even go into some specifics of the #2 prototype which will correct the problems that are incumbent to piezo electric sensors when used as replacements for standard mechanical keys.

Remember this is the first prototype and serves as a guide for what I hope will be a perfect replacements for mechanical keys.

The ability to create and than place large number of functioning piano keys in a midi format opens up vast new vistas for modern instrument creation and I hope a great many people will benefit from the opportunities presented by 1,000 years of technical evolution.

And yes, those are dominoes.

DaneMx

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