DIY Isomorphic Keyboard

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By John Baichtal
Posted 2011/03/22 @ 11:00 am
Category Music

This is a velocity sensitive MIDI isomorphic keyboard. 192 total keys. The project came out of Louisville Soundbuilders, a fortnightly meeting of circuitbenders, synth engineers and experimental musicians. After seeing a couple of my failed variations of a single-bus isomorphic keyboard, Tim was intrigued enough to design one even better. He designed multiple PCBs that sandwich together with multiple switch types for velocity sensitive keypresses.

More development on the way! We’re working on molds/methods for making hexagonal keycaps. And I’m working on an Arduino-based controller as an alternative to the midibox controller Tim has working already.

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6 Responses to DIY Isomorphic Keyboard

Anonymous on March 22nd, 2011 at 6:30 pm said:

“Isomorphic” :: isos: same/equal + morphe: shape. isomorphic: adj. the same shape as something. the question here, (perhaps revealed if one bothers to dig deeply, but i’m too busy staring at the wall), what is the something that this is the same shape as? a chain-link fence? perhaps

Anyway, well done! more keys means more goodness.

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- Christopher Cprek on March 22nd, 2011 at 6:53 pm said:
  
  Here is the answer you seek:
  
  “An isomorphic keyboard is a musical input device consisting of a two-dimensional array of note-controlling elements (such as buttons or keys) on which any given sequence and/or combination of musical intervals has the “same shape” on the keyboard wherever it occurs – within a key, across keys, across octaves, and across tunings.”
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomorphic_keyboard
  
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  Anonymous on March 22nd, 2011 at 10:18 pm said:
  
  Thank you! ..always delighted to learn stuff.
  
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mbed Microcontroller on March 22nd, 2011 at 9:55 pm said:

For anyone interested in this sort of thing, I posted a library for mbed that makes it support USB-MIDI. Might be useful for making your own controllers! http://mbed.org/cookbook/USBMIDI

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nitrofurano on March 23rd, 2011 at 12:12 am said:

what is the swastika (winkey) doing there?

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Andrew Sayler on March 23rd, 2011 at 4:56 pm said:

That looks very well made and ingenious. Maybe a side project could be “chord mallets” with heads of certain sizes and shapes to play rapid-fire chord configurations. Each one could even have moving parts, as to play several chords with one mallet.

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