EDITOR Jonathan Grudin jgrudin@microsoft.com

dination meetings. He was a friendly, soft-spoken young man in his mid-30s. He exuded confidence and frequently redirected some of our activities.

The design problem for this intricate bundle of electronics hardware and software was twofold. First, musicians are rarely, and usually don’t want to be, electronics engineers. They want to play. The control panel had to look slick and be perceived as simple to operate at performance time. We needed to bury the inherent complexity. Second, there were actually three levels of complexity from the point of view of the musician-user. Besides the performance time instrument, there were the pre-performance setup requirements. Contemporary professional musicians use sequences—repetitive series of notes in selected “voices” that are pre-programmed and can be selected quickly and introduced into the performance as repetitive background accompaniment. Like organists, the keyboard players want to be able to call up different sound effects while playing. Some of these to-be-called features were made directly available on the panel, but others had to be assigned to buttons ahead of time. Besides pre-performance setup, the more sophisticated user was also given the capability to record new sounds or to modify or adapt a factory-preset library of sounds.

Oh, I forgot to mention an additional design problem. Because of cost considerations—remember, this was 1982—we were told, in spite of protests, that we were limited to a one-line, 16-character

LED display with which to communicate all of these interactive control activities.

At performance time, the user was given direct access to controls needed in the course of a “gig” through sliders, wheels, buttons, and foot pedals. A digital number pad was used to call up prearranged sequences and keyboard assignments rapidly. For example, the keyboard could be “split” and have different instrument sounds assigned to different blocks of keys. Some numbers were assigned to factory presets and many more to user-defined presets.

For setting up keyboards, the time and effort constraints associated with live performance could be relaxed. We utilized the display to provide specific prompting of what to do next at each step. Preparing pre-recorded sequences was handled similarly.

The more difficult problem was providing access for purposes of creating new or modified versions of the stored keyboard layouts, i.e., the detailed features of stored sequences of notes and the parameters that make up each instrument sound specification. This was accomplished by thinking of the keyboard layout in terms of a spatial, two-dimensional matrix with different keyboard layouts arrayed vertically while horizontally, the detailed parameter specifications of key assignments were provided. The 16-character display could present only one cell of this matrix at a time, plus enough information to identify the context. The user employed the left-right and up-down arrow keys to move freely

November + December 2008

• Artist’s original conception of the Kurzweil “Music Machine”