Sunday Synth Jam: This video captures a live performance by composer & inventor Jacob Duringer of the first movement of his Symphony of the Seven Angels on Monolith Two-Dimensional Keyboard, an instrument of his own design.

The Monolith preserves the left-to-right spacing and layout of a traditional piano keyboard, but segments the keys, allowing different sounds or combinations of sounds to be played, depending on where you press the key.

Here’s what he has to say about the Monolith:

The Monolithic Two-Dimensional Keyboard, or Monolith for short….is a new MIDI keyboard is based upon a simple idea,: that of expanding the one-dimensional piano keyboard (which has a fixed timbre and sequential pitch changes in the X-axis) into two-dimensions (offering sequential pitch variation in the X-axis AND timbre variation in rows parallel to the first row. Each row of keys offer the possibility of different instruments in the Y-axis.

The standard piano chromatic structure remains unchanged. The whole and semi-tone keys are placed side by side rather than being set apart from each other as they are on the standard piano keyboard.

The new keyboard maintains the same length per octave as the standard piano keyboard, which allows for preservation of piano fingering technique. The keys are all equal in width, facilitating easier and more linear fingering than is possible with the piano keyboard. The key length on the Monolith is only that of a finger tip. The extra key length found on a piano keyboard does not serve a useful purpose for synthesizers since the piano keyboard originated from the cantilever action of the hammer-string mechanism. Thus, the new keyboard has been reduced to a thin strip of keys. Note however, that the piano structure and scaling is left entirely intact.

With this new design other rows of keys can be arranged above or below the first row. These rows of keys are manually accessible by moving the finger horizontally AND vertically. Now two adjacent fingers can play different rows of keys, each row assigned to a different MIDI channel and processed through a different timbre or instrument. The Monolith engineering prototype, 4th generation, contains 15 rows each of 4 octaves of keys.

Since each row can be a different instrument the performer is effectively playing an entire arrangement of a musical composition, not just a part. At any moment in time the performer can change the timbre and pitch of multiple instruments simultaneously.