Demo Hour

PianoText

Issue: XXI.6 November-December 2014
Page: 8
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Authors:
Anna Maria Feit, Antti Oulasvirta

In our search for faster text-entry systems, we were inspired by the high keying rates of skilled pianists, which are more than twice as fast as typists. We developed PianoText, which allows text entry on any MIDI-enabled piano keyboard. A computationally designed mapping assigns letter sequences of English to frequent note transitions in music, based on four concepts: redundancy, chords, sound feedback, and skill transfer. Our studies show text-entry rates of over 80 wpm and we estimate expert performance rates of 130-160 wpm. Our findings on those studies will inform the design of faster text-entry systems.

http://www.annafeit.de/pianotext

Feit, A., Oulasvirta, A. PianoText: Redesigning the piano keyboard for text entry. Proc. of the ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems. ACM, New York, 2014, 1045–1054.

Feit, A. and Oulasvirta, A. PianoText: Transferring musical expertise to text entry. Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, New York, 2013, 3043–3046.

Anna Maria Feit, Max-Planck Institute for Informatics and Saarland University
[email protected]

Antti Oulasvirta, Aalto University
[email protected]