Unichord
Have you ever wanted to hear a picture or paint your favourite song? Or make music whilst writing an email or source code? Probably not. But for musicians, it might be cool to type on a piano rather than the click-clacking QWERTY keyboard that is likely in front of you now. It should be possible to fiddle words, strum sonnets, and even sing or scat strings of text. It should be possible to play Chinese on an electric guitar, Greek on a mandolin, and Sanskrit on a sitar. In fact, one can write in most any script while playing nearly any instrument in all modern, many dead, and a handful of artificial languages.
Unichord maps a bunch of musical chords to the 100,000 plus Unicode characters in much the same way as an UTF-8 file. The results are unlikely to be heard in Carnegie Hall or win a Grammy, but it’s not too bad. I suspect it would be good chord and pitch practice. It might be an ideal way to input the thousands of Chinese characters, although the learning curve might be impossibly steep.
This is the sound of “Hello World” on a piano and on a wooden flute.
The characters of the English language can be played with one of thirty-two different chords in several keys. Capitals are in the key of D, lower cases in D#. The numbers, punctuation, space, and a bunch of symbols are in C# whilst the control characters (like copy, paste, save, etc) are in C. Other scripts require a few more chords. For example, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Hebrew require another chord. Chinese and Japanese characters require three chords to be played.
Comments
This is a stupid thing, which I presume you did to get hits to your website.
Thank you, Gelthaw, for your kind opinions. Why, do you presume, someone posts content to one’s website?
This is just a translation of language into an arbitrary, unnatural code that uses notes as character elements. That doesn’t mean it is music, anymore than banging on a piano is, even though there is a method to it.
What practical purpose do you intend?
It seems too awkward and decipherable for espionage.
It’s certainly not encryption. My goal was to find chords that were easy to play, fairly simple (debatable), did not require multiple octaves, minimized dissonance, quite a few considerations. I had no idea the outcome until I tried it.
The practical purpose is quite simple. I thought it would be cool to use an instrument – any musical instrument – as an input device, and not just the 26 Latin character alphabet, but the entire million code point character set.
Actually, I’m glad you wrote. I haven’t thought much about this since I posted the article in 2007. I just picked up an Android phone and while it’s cool, I’m not entirely sold on the text input – certainly not for non-English text. One of my earlier ideas was to create a 4-bit (16 permutation) encoding of simple symbols (horizontal, vertical, various L shaped strokes, etc) to ‘type’ UTF-8 and thus millions of unicode characters. The learning curve would be enormously difficult, though. But it could be fun.