PianoText: Redesigning the piano keyboard for text entry

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.