August 1, 2013

Dr. Andrew McPherson (inventor of the Magnetic Resonator Piano), has launched a Kickstarter project for TouchKeys, sensors for musical keyboards that turn every key into a touchpad controller. Andrew began work on the TouchKeys project during his post-doctoral fellowship at Drexel in the Music & Entertainment Technology Laboratory (MET-lab) as part of our efforts to enhance the expressive capabilities of musical instruments. Below is a video demonstrating an early TouchKeys prototype:

Dr. McPherson's fellowship was supported by the Computing Innovation Fellows program, a joint program by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Computing Research Association (CRA).

He is currently a Lecturer (Professor) at Queen Mary University of London at the renowned Centre for Digital Music (C4DM), where he continues to collaborate with the ExCITe Center to pursue new technologies for musical instruments and interfaces.

The Kickstarter effort aims to raise £30,000 (approximately US $46,000) to put the TouchKeys keycaps into limited production. There are multiple support levels available for 2- or 4-octave sets of DIY keycaps or fully configured keyboards.

Please visit the Kickstarter page to learn more and see additional coverage of TouchKeys at: GizMag, TechCrunch, Engadget, New Scientist, Fast Co. Labs, Pop Sci, and Time.