TY - CONF A1 - Herder, Jens A1 - Cohen, Michael T1 - Design of a Helical Keyboard T2 - icad'96 - International Conference on Auditory Display, Palo Alto N2 - Inspired by the cyclical nature of octaves and helical structure of a scale (Shepard, '82 and '83), we prepared a model of a piano-style keyboard (prototyped in Mathematica), which was then geometrically warped into a left-handed helical configuration, one octave/revolution, pitch mapped to height. The natural orientation of upper frequency keys higher on the helix suggests a parsimonious left-handed chirality, so that ascending notes cross in front of a typical listener left to right. Our model is being imported (via the dxf file format) into (Open Inventor/)VRML, where it can be driven by MIDI events, realtime or sequenced, which stream is both synthesized (by a Roland Sound Module), and spatialized by a heterogeneous spatial sound backend (including the Crystal River Engineering Acoustetron II and the Pioneer Sound Field Control speaker-array System), so that the sound of the respective notes is directionalized with respect to sinks, avatars of the human user, by default in the tube of the helix. This is a work-in-progress which we hope to be fully functional within the next few months. Y1 - 1996 UR - https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-hs-duesseldorf/frontdoor/index/index/docId/1856 CY - Palo Alto ER -