Programming on a Piano Keyboard

Fun idea! The note mappings shown at the end of the article seem quite specific to producing the code written for the demo, but I could imagine a more general mapping. Velocity also allows for some interesting possibilities, such as uppercase/lowercase. Rather than mapping chords to individual letters, notes could map to letters and chords involving those letters could map to common patterns with the letters as mnemonics.

Awesome hack. It&#x27;d be interesting to run the rules in reverse: i.e. take some code, run it backward through the mapping and see what music comes out.<p>(P.S. you can&#x27;t really call it C# minor if there are no cadences, ya know, in C# minor.)

Check out OSCulator if you&#x27;re on a Mac. <a href="http://www.osculator.net/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.osculator.net&#x2F;</a> You can route MIDI, plus a number of other types of physical controllers like a Wii Remote to keyboard commands, mouse movements, AppleScripts, and more.

Refreshing hack news, after all that startup BS.

I&#x27;m quite surprised Hello World in C# could ever sound so lovely.

My suggestion for the sustain pedal is enable&#x2F;disable all breakpoints.

Interesting. I did something a little like this a while back. The way I worked it, it spanned two octaves, and chords in the lower octave determined a one-to-one mapping in the upper. It seemed about as usable as any unfamiliar keyboard, though I didn&#x27;t play with it for more than about 20 minutes in total.

There&#x27;s a lot of this sort of thing going on right now actually. I&#x27;ve been experimenting with dynamic interfaces on a tablet and found it to be strangely satisfying to have task-oriented controls come into view when they&#x27;re likely to be needed.

I guess this is as sensible as the author&#x27;s master thesis titled &#x27;Adaptive Object-Oriented Architecture of Information Systems Based on High-Level Petri Nets&#x27;, where apparently he ran out of keywords to put together.

&quot;How can you tell a programmer from a musician? Ask them what C# is.&quot; LOL

Typing via a mapping to the keys is a normal feature in some integrated synthesizers. E.g. the K2600 does it... certantly beats entering in labels for patches via a little wheel or 9-key.

I like the idea of using a MIDI trigger pad for things like keyboard shortcuts or text snippets. I&#x27;m sure you could make something similar on the cheap with an arduino.

Can it make the opposite and turn code into music?

Nice to see that the key mapping was projected to sound good, not only random notes being played.

one of the earliest typewriters had a piano type keyboard. [0] <a href="http://www.nytstore.com/Typewriter-Patent--1868_p_8837.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytstore.com&#x2F;Typewriter-Patent--1868_p_8837.html</a>

The old Styx song &quot;Too Much Time on My Hands&quot; comes to mind :-D<p>Still looks like fun, though.

I imagine working in Emacs would sound like Mozart playing.