Rocking the Keys with a Multi-Touch Interface

Thomas Walther, Damir Ismailović, and Bernd Brügge

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract:

Although multi-touch user interfaces have become a widespread form of humancomputer interaction in many technical areas, they haven't found their way intolive performances of musicians and keyboarders yet. In this paper, we present anovel multi-touch interface method aimed at professional keyboard players. Themethod, which is inspired by computer trackpads, allows controlling up to tencontinuous parameters of a keyboard with one hand, without requiring the userto look at the touch area --- a significant improvement over traditional keyboardinput controls. We discuss optimizations needed to make our interface reliable,and show in an evaluation with four keyboarders of different skill level thatthis method is both intuitive and powerful, and allows users to more quicklyalter the sound of their keyboard than they could with current input solutions.

Citation:

Thomas Walther, Damir Ismailović, and Bernd Brügge. 2013. Rocking the Keys with a Multi-Touch Interface. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1178684

BibTeX Entry:

  @inproceedings{Walther2013,
 abstract = {Although multi-touch user interfaces have become a widespread form of humancomputer interaction in many technical areas, they haven't found their way intolive performances of musicians and keyboarders yet. In this paper, we present anovel multi-touch interface method aimed at professional keyboard players. Themethod, which is inspired by computer trackpads, allows controlling up to tencontinuous parameters of a keyboard with one hand, without requiring the userto look at the touch area --- a significant improvement over traditional keyboardinput controls. We discuss optimizations needed to make our interface reliable,and show in an evaluation with four keyboarders of different skill level thatthis method is both intuitive and powerful, and allows users to more quicklyalter the sound of their keyboard than they could with current input solutions.},
 address = {Daejeon, Republic of Korea},
 author = {Thomas Walther and Damir Ismailovi{\'c} and Bernd Br{\''u}gge},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.1178684},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 keywords = {multi-touch, mobile, keyboard, interface},
 month = {May},
 pages = {98--101},
 publisher = {Graduate School of Culture Technology, KAIST},
 title = {Rocking the Keys with a Multi-Touch Interface},
 url = {http://www.nime.org/proceedings/2013/nime2013_275.pdf},
 year = {2013}
}