Striso board
The Striso board is an expressive instrument and MPE MIDI keyboard that combines multidimensionally sensitive keys with an innovative note layout. The keys capture each subtle finger movement, which allows for wide levels of musical expression that are typically only characteristic of acoustic instruments. Additionally, accents and sound effects can be added by shaking and moving the instrument itself. The new note layout is designed to give players insight into musical patterns, help them understand music theory, and invite musical exploration and improvisation. The note layout is isomorphic and notes in the same key are always adjacent. The axes of the note layout are very well defined, making it easy to navigate melodic and harmonic structures. The separation of sharps and flats even opens the door for different tuning systems.
The Striso board combines full MPE sensitivity – independent per key pressure, velocity, pitch bend, and timbre – with a note layout that is not only isomorphic, but also tuning invariant. Different tunings can be selected on the Striso board and easily switched between. In order to have full control over the tuning, the different tunings are implemented in the Striso board. Since the flats and sharps are separated on the keyboard there are more than 12 notes per octave. Instead of using MIDI tuning tables the correct pitches are sent to the synthesizer using MPE pitch bend per note, so there is full control over the pitch of each note. This also means it works with any MPE enabled synthesizer.
