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Multitouch and multitimbral instrument for touchscreen (but also works with mouse).
Any number of voices can be played simultaneously.
Each row is a separate instrument, so you can play multiple instance of the same sound.
The triangles are not sensitive near the vertices so one can play whole note glissandos without lifting the finger.
It plays immediately with an USB midi device (MIDI in).

demo (piano, harpsichord and midi): https://barjak-keyboard.netlify.app

YouTube video: https://youtu.be/TAFolFpNNH0

Barjak keyboard

code: László Barják 2020

Description

Barjak keyboard is an isomorphic musical keyboard layout designed by András Barják. It uses triangles to provide its note layout instead of the more common square-based or hexagonal patterns.

History and motivation

András Barják has been obsessed with the possibilities of isomorphic keyboards since his childhood. He is an owner of an Axis 49 midi controller, and mostly been playing the Wicki-Hayden layout (also known as Jammer layout). As a young pianist, he was interested in the Jankó keyboard, and, as a guitar player, he tried several isomorphic tunings (ie. tritone tuning).

The Hexiano app, which offered both layouts mapped to a hexagonal pattern on Android platform, provided great motivation for him.

The Wicki-Hayden layout offers great improvisational possibilities for diatonic music (including folk, pop, rock, modal jazz), while the Jankó layout comes very handy for playing chromatic music (jazz, contemporary classical). However, their advantages and disadvantages are almost mutually exclusive: the ergonomic modal playability of the Wicki-Hayden layout comes at the price of sacrificing chromatic playability, while conventional diatonic or tonal music is considered to be harder to play on the Jankó layout.

The Barjak layout was born as an attempt to combine the strengths of both layouts into a single one.

Advantages

  • All fingering patterns are consistent and easy to transpose
  • Ergonomic accessibility of 4th, 5th and 8th intervals
  • Diatonic scales are always accessible on triangles of similar direction without the need to move the hand horizontally
  • Chromatic ornamentations and accidental passing tones are easily available
  • Chromatic playing is still easier compared to traditional piano keyboard layout

Disadvantages

  • More complex than Wicki-Hayden layout
  • Mistakes might sound more dissonant compared to other layouts

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