The Stenophone

As you can see this hasn't been worked on in a while. Nevertheless I still think about it and perhaps someone found it interesting to read so it's still here.

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A musical instrument combining live coding and stenotype.

Developed in the Augmented Instruments Laboratory by Jack Armitage.

Presented at the International Conference on Live Coding 2017, Morelia, Mexico. (Article PDF)

Abstract

Though laptop live coders are known to use other devices and instruments and play with other musicians, laptop live coding generally shares the common physical interface of the QWERTY keyboard. This project seeks to provide a means to explore alternatives to the QWERTY keyboard as a physical interface to laptop live coding. We present a live coding keyboard which is also a digital musical instrument, called the Stenophone. The Stenophone is an augmented stenotype or chorded keyboard, which permits continuous gestural control of keys and features an ergonomic design. These capabilities are exploited to enable the manipulation of algorithms and their parameterisation simultaneously.

System diagram

Left: Top-down view of the Stenophone with top chassis removed, annotated with type letters and sensor/marker locations. Right: Diagram of system from mechanical input to live coding.

Web app gif

Citation

@inproceedings{armitage_stenophone:_2017,
	title = {The {Stenophone}: live coding on a chorded keyboard with continuous control},
	author = {Armitage, Jack and McPherson, Andrew},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the {International} {Conference} on {Live} {Coding}},
	address = {Morelia, Mexico},
	url = {http://iclc.livecodenetwork.org/2017/},
	year = {2017},
	month = dec
}