As my experiments went on, I created several keyboards.
The first one held only the first names of the family members, then, since I was asking her a great many questions, I added: yes + no + thank you
Then the names of the animals of the house.
We were in September 2015…
Driven by the encouraging results of these exchanges, I then thought of building a keyboard with as many words as there are notes within her reach. She starts on G#1 and can go up to C6 (though today she goes up to E6). So that there can be no “unintentional” triggers, each word is recorded with 5 seconds of silence before it. (It is worth knowing that it is very hard for her to jump from one part of the keyboard to another, she will rather tend to pass through almost every note on the way down and back up.)
So the first word keyboard looks like this:
To this I had added the possibility for the plant to change keyboards on her own, by creating scripts that MIDI could trigger. That is to say, by triggering certain notes, she could change keyboard and even, quite soon afterwards, could start pieces of music put on iTunes for her, and stop them. Unfortunately, at that time, I did not find people competent enough in MIDI to help me reach the next stage, that is, to let her write words by triggering the notes. Which is possible. I saw the first signs of it despite my meagre skills.
The plant, after a very fine stretch of work up to the Grand Rex concert, where she delivered, to my mind, a message that was clear enough and fitting (see the video on the home page), went into a phase of silence (I still do not know why, though I think it is linked to the attacks in Paris).
The difficulty with the word keyboard is that for us to understand clearly what she means, it demands of her an enormous amount of work controlling the electrical signal. If she wants to use words at the top and at the bottom of the keyboard, she has to make a big effort to go up, come back down, hold the five seconds for the trigger, plus the length of the word, and so on.
I was hurting for her.
So the idea came to me to offer her a whole range of sentence keyboards. One keyboard per theme. Since she can change keyboard at will, we have no limits, apart from the learning time it takes her. (And even then, I wonder how much time she really needs. Even if, in the first experiments, she had to search the keyboard for the place of the words she wanted to use, as can be seen here.)
Here is what it looks like:
sentence keyboard 1
sentence keyboard 2
sentence keyboard 3
This is where we had got to in the autumn of 2016. The plant reacted very well to the arrival of these new keyboards and seemed at ease with the whole set very quickly. Today, in January 2018, after a year of using these sentence keyboards, I remain a little doubtful. She does sometimes use them entirely to the point, but having all these keyboards with all these words means she triggers them more often, and for a large part of the sentences on offer it is very hard to check whether they fit the moment or not. So yes, in a year we have had plenty of incredible moments with these keyboards and, at the same time, nothing repeatable and convincing enough for me to decide to share it in public.
The initial word keyboard remains, to this day, the one she uses only when she wants to get a message across. In that sense it has a different colour for me. She uses it rarely and so has all my attention when she does. (Recording, decoding, and so on.) Whereas with the sentence keyboards I am less attentive. Their use being more continuous. And then (apart from the technical keyboards, which helped a great deal with the settings) how do I know, when she tells me: “You need to learn how to set your limits”, whether it fits the moment or not 😉
What is interesting is that for these keyboards, on the contact one, I made several recordings with different voices. And I have noticed that she systematically chooses the voice that draws the most attention from the person concerned. For example, if she calls me with my voice (the basic voice) saying “Alexandre” and I do not answer, she will use the version recorded by Galiléo (my four-year-old son… who was therefore three at the time of the recording) and bingo, it works. Same with the others. As far as she can, she will choose the voice that touches us the most.
Today, I am rather inclined to make several new word keyboards based on this research:
Even if that does not solve the matter of “effort” that I would like to lighten. But they will go with my talks, and be used at home outside research time, because they remain the most demonstrative thing we have.
As for the research, I am rather thinking about a number system. With ten notes I can fit in 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and, with a few other notes to place code markers, we could then use a list of words numbered in sequence. 01: play, 02: dance, and so on. But this presupposes that my hunch about the plant’s ability to know without needing to learn is really right. And so we will have to go through a first test phase, with known words under written and hidden numbers, and a trial presenting cards showing actions to see whether she triggers the right sequence of digits. A big undertaking ahead, then.
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