A New Music Keyboard with Continuous Key-position Sensing and High-speed Communication
Adrian Freed, Rimas R. Avizienis · 2000
We describe a new music keyboard with independent, continuous position sensing capable of communicating gestural nuance available on manual tracker organs, harpsichords and pianos. We explain how the additional functionality can be obtained at a lower cost than existing keyboard controllers and demonstrate a prototype to illustrate this analysis. Our new keyboard uses optical interruption sensing for each key and hybrid space and time multiplexing to achieve the requisite scan rates. Scanned data is assembled into packets using a single FPGA and formatted for a variety of readily available communication methods including embedded in SPDIF and ADAT audio streams and as Ethernet UDP packets. 1.