By Jo Brodie and Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London
Even if you’re the best keyboard player in the world the sound you can get from any one key is pretty much limited to ‘loud’ or ‘soft’, ‘short’ or ‘long’ depending on how hard and how quickly you press it. The note’s sound can’t be changed once the key is pressed. At best, on a piano, you can make it last longer using the sustain pedal. A violinist, on the other hand, can move their finger on the string while it’s still being played, changing its pitch to give a nice vibrato effect. Wouldn’t it be fun if keyboard players could do similar things.
Andrew McPherson and other digital music researchers at QMUL and Drexel University came up with a way to give keyboard performers more room to express themselves like this. TouchKeys is a thin plastic coating, overlaid on each key of a keyboard, but barely noticeable to the keyboard player. The coating contains sensors and electronics that can change the sound when a key is touched. The TouchKeys’ electronics connect to the keyboard’s own controller and so changes the sounds already being made, expanding the keyboard’s range. This opens up a whole world of new sonic possibilities to a performer.
The sensors can follow the position and movement of your fingers and respond appropriately in real-time, extending the range of sounds you can get from your keyboard. By wiggling your finger from side-to-side on a key you can make a vibrato effect, or you change the note’s pitch completely by sliding your finger up and down the key. The technology is similar to a phone’s touchscreen where different movements (‘gestures’) make different things happen. An advantage of the system is that it can easily be applied to a keyboard a musician already knows how to play, so they’ll find it easy to start to use without having to make big changes to their style of playing.
They wanted to get TouchKeys out of the lab and into the hands of more musicians, so teamed up with members of London’s Music Hackspace community, who run courses in electronic music, to create some initial versions for sale. Early adopters were able to choose either a DIY kit to add to their own keyboard, wire up and start to play, or choose a ready-to-play keyboard with the TouchKeys system already installed.
The result is that lots of musicians are already using TouchKeys to get more from their keyboard in exciting new ways.
Earlier this year Professor Andrew McPherson gave his inaugural lecture (a public lecture given by an academic who has been promoted) at Imperial College London where he is continuing his research. You can watch his lecture – Making technology to make music – below.
Further reading
- TouchKeys Multi-Touch Musical Keyboard (December 2016) Kickstarter
- TouchKeys Creator Andrew McPherson On Bringing New Expression To Musical Keyboards (9 December 2016) Synthtopia
- TouchKeys Combines Multi-Touch And Keyboards For Musical Magic (30 July 2013) TechCrunch
- Sensitive piano keys let pianists create new sounds (10 July 2013) New Scientist
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This page is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.
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