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PianoText: redesigning the piano keyboard for text entry

Authors:

Anna Maria Feit,

Antti OulasvirtaAuthors Info & Claims

DIS Companion '14: Proceedings of the 2014 companion publication on Designing interactive systems

Pages 129 - 132

https://doi.org/10.1145/2598784.2602800

Published: 21 June 2014 Publication History

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Abstract

Inspired by the high keying rates of skilled pianists we study the design of piano keyboards for rapid text entry. We present PianoText, a computationally designed mapping that assigns letter sequences of English to frequent note transitions in music. The design is based on four concepts: 1) redundancy, 2) chords, 3) sound and 4) skill transfer. It allows fast text entry of over 80 wpm on any MIDI enabled keyboard. At the demonstration, visitors can explore the benefits of these concepts by typing on PianoText--Mini, a device that allows for piano-based typing at a portable form factor.

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References

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Buxton, B. Chord keyboards, 2012. www.billbuxton.com/input06.ChordKeyboards.pdf.

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Deutsch, D. Pitch circularity. http: //deutsch.ucsd.edu/psychology/pages.php?i=213.

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Feit, A. M., and Oulasvirta, A. Pianotext: Redesigning the piano keyboard for text entry. In Proc. DIS'14, ACM (2014).

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Index Terms

PianoText: redesigning the piano keyboard for text entry
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)

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Information & Contributors

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Published In

DIS Companion '14: Proceedings of the 2014 companion publication on Designing interactive systems

June 2014

248 pages

ISBN:9781450329033

DOI:10.1145/2598784

General Chairs:
Ron Wakkary
Simon Fraser University
,
Steve Harrison
Virginia Tech
,
Program Chairs:
Shaowen Bardzell
Indiana University
,
Carman Neustaedter
Simon Fraser University
,
Eric Paulos
UC Berkeley

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 June 2014

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DIS '14

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SIGCHI

DIS '14: Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2014

June 21 - 25, 2014

BC, Vancouver, Canada

Acceptance Rates

DIS Companion '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 107 of 402 submissions, 27%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,158 of 4,684 submissions, 25%

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DIS '25

Sponsor:
sigchi

Designing Interactive Systems Conference

July 5 - 9, 2025

Funchal , Portugal

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PianoText: transferring musical expertise to text entry