C-Thru Music is on Cringely's List of cool startups

[MusicScienceGuy]

I've nominated C-Thru Music and its Axis keyboards to the Cringely's List of innovative Start-up Companies quasi-contest.

I hope that you will visit the site and comment. It was important to get into the list early, so I did not polish the text as well as I perhaps should have, I also have a typo: "age" instead of "old". Oh well.

Ken Rushton,
MusicScienceNut.

[xjscott]

That's great that you nominated it.

I probably would have left out from a very short summary of the company wikipedia's non-notable vote, it seems kind of irrelevant.

I tend to think it makes more sense to focus on the advantages and benefits of hexagonal keyboards and even sonomes in particular, rather than other things. For example, isomorphic hexagonally arrayed keyboards go back over 100 years, and have long been recognized as a desirable instrument, but formerly the cost of producing them was extravagent. The Axis instruments marvelously are velocity sensitive, not too expensive, and support glissando.

(BTW, I wrote a thoughtful comment for the Cringely page, pressed the submit button there, and it then erased the field with my comment. I find Cringely's user interface in this regard to be unacceptable and will not rewrite my contribution there that was lost due to a poorly designed comment board.)

[MusicScienceGuy]

Thanks for responding to this. I to found the comments section very trying to use: I eventually wrote up my comment in Notepad, and then cut as pasted it into the comment, before posting it. That worked. I urge you to repost.

Upon consideration, I think I'll ask if I can have the submission updated. I put the comment in about "Wikifolks" in the hope that it would make the submission stand out as being more worthy because Wikipedia rejected it, but the comment reads poorer than intended. I'll also inform them of the problems with adding comments.

Ken.

[xjscott]

Oh you know I forgot to mention. For whatever reason the link you gave didn't work.

By googling the terms I found it at http://collaborize.democrasoft.com/port ... on=2&fpg=1

From there, click in the Entertainment category on the left side to get to the C-Thru entry.

[MusicScienceGuy]

Ok, I've asked Bob to fix my posting (in addition to explaining the problems we had with his web site).
This is what I asked to be posted:

"C-Thru Music has an potentially revolutionary product: a music keyboard line, the Axis (generically called a sonome or an hexagonal array keyboard), that is far ahead of the traditional "piano" keyboard whose design is over a thousand years old.
Their new Axis-49 keyboard is small, velocity-sensitive, generic and flexible so that it can be converted into other kinds of alternative keyboard: imagine a 196-key keyboard, with 2 mirror-imaged sections, with modulation controls placed under (or on) the thumb, than you can carry under your arm.
For information on the sonome keyboard's layout, see "Harmonic table: in Wikipedia, or wiki "jammer keyboard" to see an example of the kind of musical keyboard that the Axis-49 makes possible."

This, of course reflects my personal biases and interests. If you have better ways to phrase it, please let me know, or better yet, post them yourself to Cringely's list.

Ken Rushton,

[xjscott]

The Halberstadt (organ) keyboard layout is very old, dating back to 1361, but actually it's not a thousand years old yet.

[MusicScienceGuy]

1) I've 'spoken' with C-Thru management, and they are happy to see their keyboards sold for whatever reason. Diversifying the unit away from just being a sonome should markedly increase the interest in it. The keyboard can also function as a so-so Janko, and a really good C-system keyboard.

2) Hmmm I see that I may be off with my time-line, I assumed that the early organ keyboards (white keys only) were based on a earlier yet keyboard from a couple of centuries before, rather than being invented de novo at the time. The modern musical scales started to firm up in the 1100's with Guido of Arezzo.

Sebastian Virdung, a German priest, theorist and composer as well as the
author of the first printed manual on musical instruments, Musica getutscht
(Basle, 1511), admitted that he knew neither who was the clavichord’s inventor
nor who gave it its name. He assumed the instrument to have evolved from the
monochord, which he said had been invented by Guido of Arezzo.,
- Introduction of "The Clavichord" by Bernard Brauchli

I should be more careful
Ken.