Recent years have seen the limited introduction of entirely different keyboard layouts as electronic music controllers. One of the most impressive such interfaces was designed and built by the late Sal Martirano and his colleagues at the University of Illinois in 1969. The Sal-Mar was a live performance instrument, used by Martirano in many concerts and recordings. Musicians such as David Borden , Pat Gleason, Tangerine Dream , Klaus Schulze , and Keith Emerson actually took such huge, temperamental devices on the road and performed live with these modular systems, dynamically throwing patches and twiddling knobs to tweak or articulate a sound. Even though these interfaces are big, clumsy, and expensive, having all adjustments and parameters physically arrayed about the player can speed the process of sound design.
Some artists give musical performances from the standard keyboard and mouse of a desktop computer.
For example, Japanese computer musician Yashuhiro Otani controls dynamic audio soundscapes in live performances only with his Macintosh keyboard and a small mixer. Laurie Spiegel 's well-known Music Mouse program, already available in the late 1980's uses the computer mouse and keyboard for live control over rich audio textures. If you need RealPlayer 5.0, you can download it free here .