Dylan Horvath worked for years to get an isomorphic keyboard controller, particularly for microtonal music composition and performance. He sort of took the handoff from Siemen Terpstra, who designed a similar controller under the Terpstra named but failed to get it to market.
Having attempted to play microtonal music on a standard keyboard, I have a decent understanding of the appeal of an isomorphic keyboard. For example, I loaded up a patch on my Emu XL-7 with a 19-tone equal temperament tuning, which maps MIDI note numbers to 19 pitches per octave instead of 12. I quickly found that remembering which note is what on a standard keyboard is a challenge, because the C key on the keyboard that is up an octave from middle C, no longer triggers the octave up note, but some note lower than the octave. And it just gets worse as one travels further away on the keyboard from middle C. This lack of consistency of how keys are mapped to notes, from microtonal scale to scale, is why microtonal composers don’t like working with the standard keyboard.
Microtonal composers rely primarily on sequencers when working electronic music gear, due to the note layout inconsistency problem with standard keyboards.
The FAQ attempts to explain the isomorphic keyboard:
So the main reasons somebody interested in microtonal music would want to invest in a Lumatone:
- They can afford it.
- They want to explore harmony built on a microtonal scale - simply bending a guitar string, using a slide, using a pitch bender, etc. is not as optimal as having all the harmony notes you want to use all laid out on an instrument.
- Lumatone can be programmed for the microtonal scale, with color-coding to assist in locating where the octaves are (if it’s a repeating octave scale) and other desired landmark notes.