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MIDI, a standard for digital music since 1981, has been updated to MIDI 2.0. New MIDI 2.0 is not dependent on any particular hardware implementation such as USB or Ethernet. Some of the main goals of the new protocol are to provide higher resolution, more channels, and improved performance and expressiveness. Another change is a move from a byte stream to data packets.
MIDI 2.0 is designed to "deliver an unprecedented level of nuanced musical and artistic expressiveness," and leans on three key design decisions to do so. Firstly its new 32-bit resolution makes for smoother, continuous, analogue feel - if you want that. Controllers will be easy to use and there will be more of them. Lastly major timing advances are present in the standard.
Also at the MIDI Association's press release, Details about MIDI 2.0™, MIDI-CI, Profiles and Property Exchange.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Saturday February 01 2020, @05:21AM (2 children)
Do you know that the piano keyboard was the model that QWERTY built upon, when 19th century inventors were experimenting with keyboard layouts for typewriters? That's why the keys of the QWERTY keyboard do not line up in neat columns.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday February 01 2020, @09:21AM (1 child)
Are you sure? Because I'd say it would be significantly harder to make keys line up in vertical columns in a mechanical typewriter. The horizontal order of keys just reflects the horizontal order of the typebars. Therefore I'd say the non-vertical arrangement of the keys is simply because of the technical implications of the typewriter mechanics.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Saturday February 01 2020, @04:33PM
Pianos have somewhat the same mechanical issues. Of course, in the piano, the hammers each strike their own individual matching strings and never jam against each other, while the typewriter hammers on one small spot. But the main concern was to invoke the familiar. The keyboard of the Hall Braillewriter of 1892 is nearly identical to that of a piano. An early design was to have only 2 rows of keys, again just like a piano.
Internal mechanics have not been a design consideration ever since the advent of electronics. I keep wondering when a better arrangement of piano keys will become popular. One fairly common difficulty with piano keyboards is the "octave stretch". That's especially hard for children, with their small hands. I had to strain to do it when I had piano lessons as a kid. Perhaps at a minimum, a curved keyboard, so that the front of the piano key is narrower than the back? Or maybe, we'll pass on the whole issue because direct mental control will make the use of hands a quaint archaic way to play music.