Keyboard for Crowd

A finger painting-like motion across the keyboard's surface transforms movement into sound.

Meaning "sound in your palm" in Japanese, the eight-inch-square instrument lets would-be techno artists make beats and sequences by sliding and tapping their fingers around the touch-sensitive surface -- kind of like finger painting.

Matrixes of LED buttons cover the front and back surfaces and light up as you touch them, so you can visualize the music while you're composing.

You can program music in several ways: "Bounce" mode, for example, lets you draw a wave pattern over the surface to bring up a series of notes with a beat that corresponds to the wave's width. Other modes let you assign individual sounds to each key (hold the key down to create a repeating audio loop).

You use the jog dial and integrated LCD to switch input modes, tweak sounds,