How do keyboards make music playable? Drawing on theories of media, systems, and cultural techniques, Keys to Play spans Greek myth and contemporary Japanese digital games to chart a genealogy of musical play and its animation via improvisation, performance, and recreation. As a paradigmatic digital interface, the keyboard forms a field of play on which the book's diverse objects of inquiry—from clavichords to PCs and eighteenth-century musical dice games to the latest rhythm-action titles—enter into analogical relations. Remapping the keyboard's topography by way of Mozart and Super Mario, who head an expansive cast of historical and virtual actors, Keys to Play invites readers to unlock ludic dimensions of music that are at once old and new.
This dissertation examines modernist twentieth-century applications of the pipe organ and the carillon in the United States and in the Netherlands. These keyboard instruments, historically owned by religious or governmental entities, served an exceptionally diverse variety of political, technological, social, and urban planning functions. Their powerful simultaneous associations with historicism and innovation enabled those who built and played them to anchor the instruments' novel uses in the perceived authority of tradition, church, and state. This usage became particularly evident after World War II, when Philips Electronics and the engineers and musicians whose careers were shaped by the military-industrial complex and the Cold War used the organ and carillon to present alternative visions and performances of their research, knowledge, and services.The organ served as a vehicle for innovation for early electronic music and sound synthesis pioneers in three ways. First, it provided a model for an efficient user interface for new synthesizer technologies that found both musical and military communications applications. Second, the pipe organ became the first instrument to be electronically simulated on a commercially viable basis. As a result, the first federal legal proceedings to define the successful simulation of musical sound centered on the electronic organ. Electronic organs also helped shape a historicist "neo-baroque" movement that was, in part, both a reaction to and an outgrowth of their commercial success. Third, inventors in the field of electronics, particularly military electronics, turned to organ building to satisfy a desire to connect with historicist ideas about craft and tradition. They became leaders of the Organ Reform Movement after World War II, dedicated to reviving aspects of Baroque organ building. I build on Richard Taruskin's critique of "historically informed performance" as itself a form of modernism in order to elucidate previously overlooked relationships between Reform organ building, organ recording artists, the military-industrial complex, and cold war politics.The carillon served as a vehicle for international exchange after World War II, facilitating the sharing of soundscape and landscape design ideas between America and the Netherlands. In the 1950s, the people of the Netherlands donated a carillon to the United States as a sounding symbol of political harmony between the two allies. However, the resulting political squabbles and the disharmony and decay of its bells tolled the ineffectiveness of this instrument of diplomacy. In the following decade, Philips Electronics took inspiration from suburban American corporate research parks to construct a techno-cultural complex in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. This International Style park used the Dutch carillon's sonic and visual symbolism to re-center the perceived core of Eindhoven and of civic authority onto Philips' campus.An important part of the broader history of postwar expansion and the military-industrial complex are the science-fiction, mystery, and filmic spinoffs and sonic imaginaries associated with these reinvented carillons and organs, and the way such narratives cross the boundaries between high art and popular culture. The institutions and donors that built carillons often justified them with utopian rhetoric about creating community, public music, and elevating general musical taste. However, a vein of dystopian fiction about bells in literature, opera, film, and television counterbalanced that discourse. The realm of fiction ties together this dissertation's overarching themes of historical revival, technological innovation, modernism, and military electronics research.
The standard typewriter keyboard serves as a model for keyboards of teletypewriters, desk calculators, consoles, computer keysets, cash registers, etc. This man-machine interface should be designed to allow high-frequency, error-free operation with the least possible strain on the operator. This paper discusses several feasible biomechanical improvements of the keyboard. Some experimental findings are described which support the following design concepts: (1) the keys should be arranged in a "hand-configured" grouping to simplify the motion patterns of the fingers; (2) the keyboard sections allotted to each hand should be physically separated to facilitate the positioning of the fingers; and (3) the keyboard sections allotted to each hand should be declined laterally to reduce postural muscular strain of the operator.
Describes a simple way to familiarize blind students with the layout of a typewriter keyboard: Brailled letters of the alphabet were Thermoformed and glued to ¾ "-square ceramic tiles that had a Velcro backing. The tiles could be in turn positioned along strips of Velcro to simulate the position of typewriter keys. Once students had gained familiarity with this layout, their knowledge was tested by having them detect which tiles were missing or incorrectly positioned.
This study examines the relationship between forearm EMGs and keyboard reaction forces in 10 people during keyboard tasks performed at a comfortable speed. A linear fit of EMG force data for each person and finger was calculated during static fingertip loading. An average r2 of .71 was observed for forces below 50% of the maximal voluntary contraction (MVC). These regressions were used to characterize EMG data in force units during the typing task. Averaged peak reaction forces measured during typing ranged from 3.33 N (thumb) to 1.84 N (little finger), with an overall average of 2.54 N, which represents about 10% MVC and 5.4 times the key switch make force (0.47 N). Individual peak or mean finger forces obtained from EMG were greater (1.2 to 3.2 times) than force measurements; hence the range of r2 for EMG force was .10 to .46. A closer correspondence between EMG and peak force was obtained using EMG averaged across all fingers. For 5 of the participants the force computed from EMG was within ±20% of the reaction force. For the other 5 participants forces were overestimated. For 9 participants the difference between EMG estimated force and the reaction force was less than 13% MVC. It is suggested that the difference between EMG and finger force partly results from the amount of muscle load not captured by the measured applied force.
