idm

Dreamt about attempting a Chopin-Godowsky [the upside-down "Butterfly" étude] on the keyboard of my 12-inch iBook. Needless to say, the result was nothing short of spectacular failure, although my avatar refused — to the bitter end — to recognize the folly of the endeavor.

But would it be feasible to re-conflate the two implementations of the word “keyboard?” As the iBook has 80 keys while the standard piano has 88, a direct key-mapping is likely out of the question — and in any case undesirable, considering our normally lazy approach to typing.

What about an information-theoretic approach? A gzip’d MIDI of the aforementioned étude weighs in at 7kB over a mere 50 seconds, a formidable 140 bytes per second. On the other end of the spectrum, the gzip’d prelude from Bach’s Book I is 1.7kB over two minutes, a decimated 14 bytes per second.

In comparison, a virtuoso typist might hit 120 wpm, with words standardized to 5 keystrokes, or [generously] 5 bytes. All told, that’s 10 bytes per second, which turns out to be barely acceptable for a slothful Bach prelude and an immeasurably far cry from the offending Godowsky étude.

In conclusion: futility.

Note: If chording is allowed, a stenographer can reach 300 wpm, or 25 bytes per second. Still utterly un-Godowskian.