I didn’t want a job anyway.

Below are six keyboard coloring schemes. The first three are ways of coloring a chromatic keyboard. The second three are ways of coloring a diatonic keyboard. Here’s a legend for the six variations below:

1. Chromatic keyboard with chromatic coloring
2. Chromatic keyboard with diatonic coloring
3. Same as #2, using opposite colors
4. Diatonic keyboard with diatonic coloring
5. Diatonic keyboard with chromatic coloring
6. Same as #5, using opposite colors

[I’m trying out a new drawing program, so please excuse the big “UNREGISTERED” watermark. If I end up registering it, I’ll replace the image, or better yet, break it into six images. Okay, I know. It’s ridiculous. But I need to go to bed.]

These were inspired by a photo that Paul Morris posted to the MNMA forum, in which he had physically used black tape and white tape to achieve the coloring in #5 above on his traditional keyboard.

The advantage of the uniform Janko keyboard pattern is mind-boggling:
The Janko keyboard pattern does away with practicing scales, would you believe?! This is the true reason, why so many hobby musicians (like me!) got stuck with playing mostly in C-major & A-minor scales and lost out on a great deal of musical joys and creativity.
With Janko one only needs to learn one major and one minor scale-pattern. From then on one can play all 24 major & minor scales.

As I sat at the piano considering these words, I realized that there are really twice as many scales as that, if you count both hands separately. My left hand is not a copy of my right hand. It’s a mirror image of it. The muscle movements and fingering for playing D-flat major in my right hand are much different than the movements and fingering for playing it in my left hand. So then there are actually 24 different scale patterns to learn (12 for the left hand, and 12 for the right hand), or if you count major and minor scales separately (as Johannes did in his email above), then there are 48 separate scales to learn (24 for the left hand, and 24 for the right hand).

The fact that one hand mirrors the other also reminded me of Vincent Persichetti’s “Mirror Etudes”, a selection of which I played in my junior or senior recital in college (I can’t remember which). One thing I liked about this piece is that all I really had to do was learn the right hand, and then make the same movements in my left hand, taking advantage of the fact that the piano keyboard mirrors itself (pivoting around D and A-flat). Persichetti used this algorithmic device (where one hand’s part is a simple function of the other hand’s part) to very nice effect, perhaps in some ways in spite of the device.

The next thought I had was: “What if each hand had its own keyboard, so that the same movements and fingerings would produce the same notes?” If I traverse the five-finger position from my thumb to my pinky in my right hand, then the pitches go up (get higher). On a regular piano, if I do the same thing in my left hand, they go lower. That’s the mismatch. What if they both went higher, so that playing a given part in the right hand felt exactly like playing that part in the left hand? I then supposed that this would require two different keyboards: one for my left hand and one for my right hand. The right-hand keyboard could be the “normal” one, and the left-hand keyboard would be reversed: moving to the left causes the pitches to rise, and moving to the right causes them to descend. We could then speak, instead of moving left or right, of moving outward or away from the body (ascending in pitch), and inward or toward the body (descending in pitch). With a setup like this, if you act as if you’re playing the Persichetti etudes on a traditional keyboard, you’d now actually be playing both hands in unison (robbing the piece of its character, but that’s not the point).

Google can have a tendency to quash creative thinking. What seems like an original idea turns out to be not so original. Then again, it can also have a validating effect. Regardless, someone has already had this idea (and patented it). There’s also a diagram showing how the left-hand keyboard is re-mapped. Actually, now that I look at the diagram, I see that it’s not quite the same as what I had in mind. I was thinking of just reversing a traditional piano keyboard. The diagram for this patent shows a 6-6 pattern (like Janko) for both keyboards. So in that case I suppose you could truly say that the user would only need to learn 1 single diatonic scale pattern, as opposed to 24. Not bad.

But that’s not all. A pianist named Christopher Seed has actually built a left-handed piano. (Be sure to check out his videos page too, where he shows off his ambidexterity.) Not only that, but his website offers a simple hardware module called The Keyboard Mirror that transforms a MIDI keyboard into a left-handed (reversed) MIDI keyboard! This probably wouldn’t be too difficult to implement in software too. So to try my idea out, all I’d need is two MIDI keyboards, one unmodified and one with the Keyboard Mirror plugged into it. To keep things really interesting, I could try switching them around: not only right/normal, left/reversed; but also left/normal, right/reversed.

I just had a funny thought: playing Persichetti’s Mirror Etudes on a left-handed piano would be almost exactly like playing them on a traditional piano! (Except that when you try to voice the upper parts, you’d start wondering why the bass part is getting louder!)

Now, for a real mind-bending exercise, try playing the Mirror Etudes using a left-handed (reversed) keyboard for the left hand and a traditional (not reversed) keyboard for the right hand. Of course, that seems about as sensible as using Vim with a Dvorak keyboard.

Update: When I wrote that last paragraph earlier tonight, I hadn’t realized that playing the actual Mirror Etudes using symmetrical manuals would be “as if” you were playing both hands in unison on a traditional keyboard. The simplicity of this two-way function (reverseHalf mirrored = unison; reverseHalf unison = mirrored) obviously hasn’t sunken in yet, since it’s still all just up in my head. Yes, I’ve gotta try this out!

The above example contains all 12 major triads (with doubled roots), traversing over them in two sequences that correspond to the two whole-tone scales. As you can see, there are just two keyboard patterns to learn. (With a Janko keyboard that has more than just two rows of keys, then there’s really just one keyboard pattern to learn. To move up a half step, you’d just shift from the first and second rows to the second and third rows, keeping your hand in the same position.) A comparison with the Klavarskribo equivalent for the traditional piano keyboard shows just how irregular the traditional keyboard is, and how many patterns you have to learn within those same 12 keys (for chords, scales, etc.).

Below are the first six chords (in regular Klavarskribo notation), corresponding to the whole-tone scale starting on C. One thing that was apparently not made explicit in the Klavar-Nieuws article was which key is indicated by the thicker vertical lines in the 6-6 notation above. In my transcription to regular Klavarskribo, I just chose a mapping: B for the thicker lines so that C lands just to the right of each thicker vertical line in the 6-6 notation. Thus, the first sequence would then start with the C-Major chord:

And here’s the second sequence, traversing the whole-tone scale starting on D-flat:

As you can see, there’s nothing in these sequences that approaches the regularity of the 6-6 keyboard patterns. There’s a lot to discuss in comparing the two keyboard layouts—enough to leave for another blog post.

The message in the MNMA forum that described the 6-6 Klavar notation contained lots of fascinating insights, along with quotes relating to the 6-6 keyboard from a letter written by Pot. I wish I could link to it directly. The problem is that the MNMA forum messages are currently only accessible to members (although anyone can join). That may (hopefully) change in the near future and in fact is being discussed on the list right now.

But tonight I am tired, preoccupied with rodent problems, upcoming business trips, vacuum cleaner shopping, etc. So I’m not going to try and eek out any Klavarskribo-related wisdom, for example.

At some point, I’d like to figure out what my blogging philosophy is, as I still haven’t been able to figure it out. That’s the main reason I’ve posted so infrequently. Who I am I writing for? Myself? Other people? Which people? Especially when getting started, it seems like no one is really out there, and so I feel like I’m just writing to myself. On the other hand, anyone in the world could be reading this, so I’m simultaneously crafting my online identity for the whole world to see. Which aspects of my life or work or interests do I want to share? I’ve never really decided, so I just put my name as the title of this blog, to keep things open. But then again, to what extent should my blog be about my identity anyway? Having my name at the top seemed like a good way to keep things open-ended, but now I’m thinking it too much implies that *I* will be the primary topic or focus of the blog.

Maybe having separate blogs, each with a more narrowly defined focus, is the answer. My attitude when writing a book is to serve and provide value to my readers in the best way I know how. Why should blogging be any different? I may decide to nix the whole artificial quota idea too (once per day), which can have a tendency to result in aimless posts like this one. But I guess that’s why it’s called a 30-day trial.

The new mission statement from the website is as follows:

The Music Notation Project seeks to raise awareness of the disadvantages of traditional music notation, to explore alternative music notation systems, and to provide resources for the wider consideration and use of these alternatives. We hope our efforts will help make reading, writing, and playing music more enjoyable and easier to learn.

Today’s letter detailing the announcement hints at what some of the practical differences will be:

While we are still interested in research that evaluates different [notation] systems, we believe we can best further such comparative work through the development of software that can rapidly convert a lot of music into a wide variety of systems.

I think this makes a lot of sense. New notation efforts should take new technology into consideration and benefit from it.

The other practical difference, apart from having a new, nicely designed website, is the name change. “The Music Notation Project” rolls of the tongue much more nicely than “Music Notation Modernization Association”. I was just joking today that the name is a bit “shun”-heavy. Well, they fixed that now.

We had a little setback involving lost code. Ironically, this happened when I was trying to set up version control to guard against this very thing. I’ve posted a message to the user’s list for the IDE that failed to give me a warning before deleting all this naive user’s code, in hopes that similar mistakes by other users can be prevented. Hindsight is 20/20. I should’ve backed it up before trying to…back it up. It would also have been good to have Time Machine set up already, but I hadn’t done that either.

Thankfully, I did still have an older version of the code from before I switched over to the development environment that I’m now using, so I don’t have to start totally all over. And you can be sure that I have already secured that code into version control on a server machine so that I can continue from now on from a solid base.

How bad is it? Well, we were on Video #7. Let’s just say we’ve now reverted back to Video #3. In other words, all the code I wrote in the last two weeks is gone.

Maybe this is a blessing in disguise. Sure, I learned a lesson and I won’t make this mistake again. But the blessing might be that my continued dependency on MIDI files as the game’s underlying format is now that much less alluring. The MIDI crutch has been snatched out from under me. I don’t need to wrest myself from the MIDI code so I can move onto a better way. The code has wrested itself from me…

I was going to add bar lines tonight. Oh well, those can wait.

Before you know it, the ninja will be feeling better than ever.

Video #7: Notation-consistent note releases (Quicktime streaming)

I think it works pretty well for this piece of music. The sudden flash of each note release now coincides with the attack of the next note. I think it now looks smooth and rhythmic, which is what I was hoping for.

Video #6: Note OFF events visualized (Quicktime streaming)

The game isn’t making any sound in this video, because I’m not playing along on the MIDI keyboard. It’s easier to see the note releases when I’m not playing along and adding all the green and red colors. The piece is the same one I’ve been using for the last few demos: Chopin Waltz in E-flat, Opus 18.

The molasses effect of lingering notes is gone, so that’s good. But the note releases are accented too much, in that the suddenness of the notes’ disappearance tends to be the most visually striking movement that’s going on. It’s also dependent on the interpretation of the person who rendered the performance in the MIDI file. My theory is that if performance-dependent note releases are ignored and instead the actual note value is reflected (regardless of whether the note should be played staccato), then the accented note releases will actually help rather than hinder the feeling of the beat, since they’ll most often coincide with the attack of the next note. I’m looking forward to testing my theory out (and then moving on past this academic theorizing).

• It’s much nicer than before: crisp and clean releases, but…
• the effective duration doesn’t necessarily correspond to the actual note value.

A MIDI file contains a rendition of a piece, not (necessarily) the authoritative musical information you’d need to reconstruct a score. Staccato durations, for example, get interpreted as short notes that obscure the actual notated value. I’m coming to terms with what I want PianoNinja to do: display a score (in Klavarskribo notation) that can be relied upon as containing the more-or-less canonical information that makes up the piece. While there might be many and varied MIDI files for the same Chopin Waltz, I don’t want PianoNinja to be subject to those variations.

So while I’m glad that I got the MIDI Note OFF events to be reflected, the associated note-vanishing is still a bit jumpy-looking, since they don’t always coincide with the attack of the following note. Before diving into using MusicXML instead, I might try to see what sorts of MIDI file quantization I could do to stretch each duration out for its full note value. I’m going for the path of least resistance here in keeping this project moving forward—without compromising the steady vision I have for what PianoNinja can be.