re: xen keyboards, Graham Breed, etc.

>The honeycomb design seems to give the biggest range of weird chords, not
>all of them playable with one hand.

The honeycomb design does make things a bit more compact, but actually
seems to make most chords harder, by restricting liberty along on the
perpendicular axis -- you have to hit notes on the dot. Rectangular keys
spread the note out more. Try a 1st-inversion minor triad on Erv's
keyboard v. something like the Wendy Carlos design.

>If it's two-dimensional, it isn't a line, is it?

If you view the Bosanquet scheme on a plane, the pitch rises along a
"front", which is represented by a line. Depending on the order of the
tuning, you may have to adjust the spacing of the keys a little, but...

>Staff notation, and variations thereof, always have modal invariance.

Very important!!!

>(And those Ztars look *smart*.)

Harvey played one for me when I was in San Diego. They have enormous
potential -- you can "fret" a single string in more than one place. And,
since you're hitting buttons instead of reaching between frets, many of the
fingering problems associated with higher divisions of the octave may be
avoided. But I'll defer to a guitarist on that one.

>Now we have an argument as to whether or not a wind controller qualifies
>as a keyboard.

No we don't -- I won't argue about that!

>They look like very useful MIDI input devices, but don't have enough keys
>for the kind of microtonality we're talking about

Eeet! With 8 keys you'd have 256 notes. See Genovese's Binary Flute
article in XH 7+8. Interestingly, the yamaha link you gave has a page on
their wind controller -- one of the most popular, I understand. The other
famous one is the Akai Ewi, which I believe got started in the days before
MIDI, but has now been updated.

>Who's Norman Henry?

Try searching the Onelist archives.

-Carl