Conference Agenda

In 2024, Kinetic Labs released a YouTube short with the tagline: “Which of these keyboards would you eat?” Punning on the taste of the keyboard company’s “Matcha” and “Toffy Bunny” keycaps and “Latte” switches, the video presents a series of sound tests on mechanical computer keyboards, inviting the viewer to aurally sample the sonic profiles of each keyboard’s combination of casing, keycaps, and switches. The video’s tagline simultaneously suggests the metaphorical taste and oral consumption of the keystrokes’ aural clicks and clacks.

Such videos playing upon the experience and aesthetics of keyboard sounds have become commonplace on social media, and the hobby of building and customizing keyboards particularly flourished during the COVID-19 lockdown. As attention turned towards home-office equipment upgrades and refining the work-at-home experience, content creators and keyboard sellers in turn manufactured typing videos and sound tests, often commercialized as “ASMR” soundtracks or extensive product reviews. Stemming from the familiar challenge of describing timbre, content creators and consumers have generated a feedback loop of oft repeated timbral keywords, at once suggestively vivid yet unsatisfyingly vague. “Creamy,” and “poppy” emerged as popular terms, alongside other—less edible—neologisms. As the blogpost “What the Thock is Clack?—A Discussion on Switch Sound” (2022) argues, this pair of onomatopoeic terms reify a continuum of the low (“thock”) to high (“clack”) sound frequency signatures of keyboards, in which the nebulousness of these buzzwords ultimately obfuscate timbral experiences.

This paper considers the computer keyboard as a sonic instrument through the lens of critical organology (Tresch and Dolan 2013) and examines the new semantic uses circulating within the keyboard enthusiast community. The generation of these terms, I argue, reflects a discourse that is actively engaged with timbre, and hence with the articulation of aesthetic experience. I further suggest the intersection of aural and gustatory metaphors offers sound studies scholars a new frame with which to consider questions of embodiment and synesthesia in cross-modal mapping of listening and taste.

Among the unique affordances of the clavichord is the ability to bend pitch through exerting force on the sounding key. This manifested in the techniques of Bebung and Tragen der Töne, which acquired their own standard notation as displayed in texts by Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach (1753), Daniel Gottlob Türk (1789), and Ernst Wilhelm Wolf (1785). The use and physical action of these expressive pitch devices have connections to stringed instruments. Writers, such as Christopher Hogwood (1995) and Richard Troeger (1987), have made this association in terms of basic vibration but never delved into the physicality, utilization, or sonic subtleties shared by the clavichord and violin.

Historically, the relation is tangible. To some, the clavichord served as a foundational pedagogical tool; the directness of touch on the clavichord empowers a keyboardist’s intimate and minute expression. Within lessons, Türk suggested that the teacher accompany keyboard students with another instrument, such as the violin, to guide proper performance. The violinist could then serve as a model for musical affordances that were available to clavichordists but lost for later pianists. The teacher’s embodied knowledge of the violin would have influenced not only their approach towards clavichord technique but subsequently their students’. A realized instance of this occurs in Johann Wilhelm Häßler’s sonata with flute or violin from his six easy sonatas (1787) where the keyboardist is to play Tragen der Töne simultaneously with the other instrument’s portato notes upon several occasions. Rather than the differences between these two techniques posing a conflict, they offer a musical outcome that demonstrates commonalities. This presentation bridges a chasm between these two instruments and reveals a shared technique that has resounding implications.