Rocking the Keys with a Multi-Touch Interface

Although multi-touch user interfaces have become a widespread form of humancomputer interaction in many technical areas, they haven't found their way intolive performances of musicians and keyboarders yet. In this paper, we present anovel multi-touch interface method aimed at professional keyboard players. Themethod, which is inspired by computer trackpads, allows controlling up to tencontinuous parameters of a keyboard with one hand, without requiring the userto look at the touch area - a significant improvement over traditional keyboardinput controls. We discuss optimizations needed to make our interface reliable,and show in an evaluation with four keyboarders of different skill level thatthis method is both intuitive and powerful, and allows users to more quicklyalter the sound of their keyboard than they could with current input solutions.