8 ms·
Typing with a Piano [video]
- illnewsthat 8y agoBesides 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 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 https://play.bot.land
- rafael859 8y agoI 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.
- williamdclt 8y agoI find that space being always the same note does bring some more musicality actually! It brings structure to the sound instead of sounding like a mess of random notes
- aasasd 8y agoObviously space should be remapped to a hit on a snare or bass drum.
- britch 8y agoWow pressing the key harder for upper case is very good. I would take that in a regular keyboard.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoI don't think I would. I can coordinate moving two fingers (shift and the character) easier than I can control the force that I hit a key with... at least I think I can. Some of that may be training, though. I also suspect that the keyboard layout is more standardized between keyboards than the force threshold would be. (And, it occurs to me that we're essentially chording with the shift key.)
- aldanor 8y agoYea that's a good one. Same with numbers and special characters. Someone needs to make a velocity-sensitive mechanical qwerty keyboard :)
- Adam13531 8y agoWhat's fun is that it's the only time when typing in all caps actually makes you feel like you're shouting! But I'm not too sure how useful it is for efficiency even after practicing so much with it; there are a lot of false positives and negatives since keypress velocity doesn't matter for regular typing. With enough data, you could figure out a specific velocity threshold for each key so that you make fewer mistakes, and then maybe it'd be more helpful.
- ordu 8y agoIf you make a responsive keyboard, which would give a different tactile sensation for CAPS and for lowercase, then it would be easier. Piano gives this kind of distinction, historically it was due to a mechanism behind "FortePiano", in a modern electrical piano it reproduced for a convenience. It can be made in a mechanical way, like a tristate button -- off, slighly-on, on.
- mikecsh 8y agoReminds 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboard
- leoc 8y agoHere's the chapter on chord keybords http://billbuxton.com/input06.ChordKeyboards.pdf http://billbuxton.com/input06.ChordKeyboards.pdf from Bill Buxton's work-in-progress book Human Input to Computer Systems: Theories, Techniques and Technology http://billbuxton.com/inputManuscript.html http://billbuxton.com/inputManuscript.html . Steno keyboards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype are chording keyboards. The Velotype http://www.velotype.com/en/ http://www.velotype.com/en/ and Veyboard http://www.veyboard.nl/en_main.html http://www.veyboard.nl/en_main.html use a similar system that would be a lot more suitable for general-purpose text input. Then there's the important niche of one-handed chording keyboards, like the one Doug Engelbart designed for the NLS system, and the mobile, wireless Twiddler3 https://twiddler.tekgear.com/ https://twiddler.tekgear.com/ .
- mikecsh 8y agoWow, thanks for the treasure trove of links!
- williamdclt 8y agoThis 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
- avodonosov 8y agouseful
- Adam13531 8y agoHey, 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 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!
- Feuilles_Mortes 8y agoIt might be fun/interesting to pipe pieces transcribed to MIDI into your system and see what falls out. I'm sure it'll be nonsense, but perhaps fun nonetheless. (e.g. http://www.piano-midi.de/chopin.htm http://www.piano-midi.de/chopin.htm)
- Adam13531 8y agoI made a little explanatory document (https://goo.gl/Vq3Fsb https://goo.gl/Vq3Fsb) to go along with the typing tests that I streamed today, and that was one of the things that I mentioned (copy/pasting from there): Q: Can you play a real song so that we can see what it types out? A: This isn't as satisfying as you may think since the entire typing range is only about two octaves, and most songs exceed that range, so nothing actually gets typed when you play those notes. Anyway, here's Wonderwall: Iuiuigaezobzgbxgebiuiuigaezobzgbegz (that's actually the right hand of Für Elise)
- rhizome 8y ago
- mastazi 8y agoIt 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 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 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 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/ http://www.openstenoproject.org/
- djmips 8y agoWow the stenotype machine at the Italian Senate is actually a piano keyboard!
- mastazi 7y agoI just wanted to add that, in order to use the Michela Method with Plover (the software from OpenSteno), you will also need the Plover-MIDI plugin: https://pypi.org/project/plover-midi/ https://pypi.org/project/plover-midi/ (both "plover" and "plover-midi" are on Pip)
- andrewflnr 8y agoI 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".
- Adam13531 8y agoSomething I didn't mention in the video is that I had to tweak the positioning of certain letters due to common digrams in English. For example, I originally had "v" as a right-hand thumb key due to its frequency as a standalone letter, but some common English words have the digram "ev" ("ever", "every", "never"), and "e" was also a thumb key, so I remapped the "v" to my pinky to make those words much more smooth. To do that same process for musicality would be challenging since your average English sentence contains so many different letters. I would probably do something like assign each letter a set of sounds, then pick one of those sounds based on the rest of the sentence.
- andrewflnr 8y agoIt's definitely not something you'd want to do manually. I'd want to come up with a representation of the layout that lets you run a genetic algorithm or similar on it, and score them on musicality when used to type some representative corpus of text. That's a much bigger research project, though (read: extra insane :D).
- Adam13531 8y agoRE: "much bigger research" - fully agreed! Sometimes, I daydream and wonder what it would be like if it were my job to do something like this for, say, two whole months. Then I could try tackling issues like making this more musical. Then again, I know that if I had two months, I'd try to break the 80 WPM barrier. In the end, I don't think there are many practical applications to something like this. I only had one real problem that could potentially be solved by this—it's when I'm working in a music program with my piano and limited physical desk space. The keyboard would be out of reach, so I could press an escape chord on the piano to enter Keyiano Mode, type whatever I needed, then reenter Piano Mode. The learning curve could be decreased by making on-screen overlays to show you what each key would do at any given time. But yeah, that's solidly in daydream territory since I've got bigger fish to fry for now.
- KyleBrandt 8y agoI 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.
- aasasd 8y agoEarly printing telegraphs used keyboards like musical ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Telegraph_Keyboard.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Telegraph_Keyboard.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Printing_Telegraph.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 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.
- soheil 8y agoNext make a computer keyboard sound like a piano.
- betenoire 8y agoThis is a thing, of course. It can be used for playing midi on your laptop, and such.
- zwkrt 8y ago"uttering a word is like striking note on the keyboard of the imagination". Except this time in reverse!
- nullc 8y agoThe 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. :)
- nixpulvis 8y agoIntegrate this with https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware!! https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware!!!
- t3hprofit 8y agocan'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
- Adam13531 8y agoThe April Fool's joke was that I'd even bother spending my time trying to learn this, but I assure you, it's all real! I linked to this elsewhere in the thread, but here's a Twitch VOD of practically nonstop typing tests for a few hours: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/404585365 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/404585365 (it's not really worth watching if you're satisfied with the YouTube video )
- t3hprofit 8y agoYea I saw your design doc. Impressive project. I only questioned it because looking at your YouTube it seemed that you had a history of posting on April 1st. Which, I really appreciate learning how to hack. Now I am getting everything free from Amazon. But don’t tell the CIA
- t3hprofit 8y agoAlso “traceRT”, I died
- navane 8y agoAh, I remember playing the original starcraft broodwar with a midi keyboard. About 1 hour of python coding.
- Rampoina 8y agoSee http://annafeit.de/pianotext/ http://annafeit.de/pianotext/ for another interesting take on this idea.
- afandian 8y agoFull circle, implement text-to-speech on a piano. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjtZxjEH6cM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjtZxjEH6cM (if you've not seen that video, it's a little mind-bending)
- bartimus 8y agoSince 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?