I’ve been working on, and recently released, a new music tool for all who like writing songs but may not have learned how to play guitar or piano. Besides helping singers and young children and students, it may also bring a certain degree of musical expression to those who are physically challenged. The tool allows the user to play basic chord progressions in any major key with just a mouse (on computers running Windows.) The chords are played using the General Midi soundfont on the computer’s sound card.

The mouse plays 4-note chords (in various inversions), and the arrow keys play the individual notes in the chord, so there is quite a lot of interactivity.

I was even able to use a Midi Jack and a free VST host (Cantabile 1.2 Lite) to access and play free software synths like purple.dll or crystal.dll.

(The program does not record performances… in this respect it’s more like an acoustic instrument - to hear something again, you have to play it again… but I think Cantabile 1.2 Lite might be able to record the Midi stream flowing through it.)

On my computer running XP, the response is fast enough to almost play “live.” However, some of the other computers I’ve tested it on have a little more latency, which means it still functions well as a songwriting tool, but is not quite responsive enough to create the feel of playing a live instrument.

Still, I’ve been a little surprised at what it can do. I thought your readers interested in alternate controllers might like to know about it. The link is http://www.Chordmaps.com/YoursToPlayIt/

Thank you.

Steve Mugglin
Music Theory For Songwriters
Chordmaps.com

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,111729-page,1/article.html

You could get a wider range of expression by handing over some of the work to the computer. If you know what scale you want to play in at a given moment you could have, say, a Trigger Finger setup for scale selection, another for the notes (chromatic scale plus four modifier pads), and yet another for… arpeggiation/ Instrument/Filter. Or it could go sequentially: bash-bash-bash-bash means you’ve selected scale, key, rhythm (gated/flowing) and timbre (loop length? Sample start?). Intensity/volume could be the average velocity of all four ‘bashes’ Another twist is each bash could actually trigger a percussive sample at the same time as selecting these variables (doesn’t have to be a different sample each time), and the actual choices you have made affect the NEXT loop or phrase, if you’re into loop-based stuff. I’d say something like Bidule would be a good testing bed for this.

Dummy clips in Ableton Live are a powerful thing, and I find setting them up a quite satisfying way of executing an idea which I’ve no chance of pulling off in the middle of performance as it just involves too many knob twists/button presses, or precise value intervals which I’ve no hope of hitting. It means you can put some personality into a sound event even if you’re not physically able or don’t want to micro-manage the execution of it.

This is more on the software side of things so I’m not sure how much practical help it is…

In a past life I was a stenographer. A stenograph machine is like a typewriter/QWERTY keyboard except you press the keys simultaneously in a ‘chording’ action as opposed to one-by-one. Each key is its own word/letter when pressed (like the ‘one sample per bash’ I described above), but in combination with other keys it’s possible to build up a complex system of commands with relatively little physical movement. The layout of an actual steno machine might make it useless to someone mobility-impaired (the keys are set very close together), but I’ve often thought the theory could be used in musical applications with a custom-built controller.
The way I learned the theory you have a bank of ‘initial’ command keys on the left side of the controler and a bank of ‘final’ command keys on the right (with four ‘in-between’ keys). You can ‘play’ any key on its own (initial keys would often be single-syllable words, final keys often word/phrase endings), or you can combine keys to make a word or an entire phrase. For example, LAI is ‘lay’, but LAIRJ is ‘ladies and gentlemen of the jury’. It just depends on what you define in your dictionary as the action to be executed when a particular combination is pressed. If a stenographer was inclined they could simply define LAIRJ as ‘large’, but you get more mileage the way it is because you condense five or six hand movements into one. In musical terms LAI could be ‘legato A Ionian scale’ and LAIRJ could be ‘legato A Ionian scale in reverse with filter J’.

You don’t have to include everything in the one command: One of the types of command stenographers use is the ‘___ Next’ command, e.g. ‘Cap Next’ (KP-N) which capitalises any subsequent word/phrase. So for example you could specify the reverse & filter parts separately.

Of course as you add more elements you want to control you start running out of space fast. Whoever invented the steno theory got around this by doubling up on the functions of keys, therefore E is E, U is U, but E and U together (they are adjacent in this interface) makes I. As you can imagine takes a long time to memorise, but it is possible and worthwhile when you realise a couple of keys can do a completely different function if you just press them at the same time.

On the technical side: the computer still just sees an EU in the steno machine’s output - it’s really just your brain - and by extension your computer’s dictionary of commands - which dictates how that EU is to be interpreted.

One possible limitation of this system is that the command is only sent to the computer when you raise the keys after depressing them… otherwise you would just get a continuous ’stack’ of information with no beginning or end, i.e. the system ‘waits’ for any information until it gets the /end command signal. Maybe your foot could come into play with this… not sure how it would work though…

I hope this gives you some ideas. Let me know if you’d like me to clarify anything!

Eoin

My guess is that if you have a disability you already know about this, but I wanted to bring it up as it might help bring edge-cases closer to using existing software.

Also… Peter: Will you please post a round up of options from this thread as a separate post? This is a pretty niche situation and it would be good to conglomerize the results. It’s fascinating (as a person who is “normally-abled” but very very interested in haptics). If you don’t have the time to do so let me know and I will.

I also think that the harmonica type wind controller+foot pedals is an awesome idea.

Someone thought