Lumatone by its very nature allows you to create a musical instrument with virtually unlimited visual appearances, behaviours, and modes. It all depends on how you map its 280 keys, and on what kind of sound-generating device you choose to control with it. Infinitely customizable, Lumatone can shape-shift into thousands of different instruments with the push of a button simply by changing mappings.  

A mapping defines the characteristics of each key on Lumatone. At the heart of Lumatone’s power is that each key can be set to a different colour, allowing for visual patterns to be created that help to reinforce the intervals between notes. Each key can then be set to transmit any MIDI channel/note, and set to various expressive modes (ie. note on/off, continuous controller, or Lumatouch). MIDI notes are assigned to particular pitches or parameters within a sound-generating device, allowing the performer to visually map the playing surface with colour in a way that makes playing even complex tunings, intervals, or scales intuitive and easy to understand. 

Because there are so many approaches to customizing Lumatone, we encourage the exploration of existing mappings, some of which were preloaded on your Lumatone. Ultimately, we hope to inspire you to think outside of the box, create your own mappings, and maybe even share them with the wider community.

As the Lumatone community grows, you’ll be able to find an ever-expanding library of mappings designed by respected composers, performers, and producers, along with descriptions of how best to use them, and the intent behind their creation.

While it wouldn’t be possible to go through the myriad of mapping types within this manual, let’s explore a few broad and common categories of mappings that inspired the creation of Lumatone.

Isomorphic Keyboard Layouts

One of the most exciting ways to use Lumatone is to create and perform using Isomorphic mappings. While the word Isomorphic sounds like something straight out of Star Trek, it’s actually all about simplicity. Isomorphic layouts have been around since the mid-1800’s, and are an approach to laying out notes on a grid that in many ways makes music theory less complex.

Pictured above: The "Harmonic Table" isomorphic layout, popularized by the C-Thru Music Axis 64, adapted to a Lumatone.

An isomorphic layout is any grid of notes on which any given interval retains the same shape on the keyboard wherever it occurs. This phenomenon can occur within a key, across different keys, across octaves, and even across different tunings. Play a major chord shape with a root of C, and move the same shape to start on an E, and you’ll have an E major shape. Though quite different, this is in a lot of ways far more intuitive and easy to understand than the traditional piano.

For more than a century now, many different styles of isomorphic layouts have been developed. Some of the more common and practical layouts are: Bosanquet, Janko, Wicki-Hayden, Gerhard, Park, Wesley, and the Harmonic Table, the latter of which was popularized by the C-Thru Music Axis 64 keyboard. While that layout focused on the playing of chords and harmonic elements, other isomorphic layouts prioritize scales, note repetition, or microtonality.

Isomorphic layouts enable a vastly different way of thinking about the intervals between notes, but the uniformity involved also creates a very favourable environment for playing in non-standard and microtonal tunings, especially on keyboards with multiple rows of keys like Lumatone. 

Universally, an isomorphic layout provides the benefit of invariance, meaning the intervals between notes never change from key to key. Isomorphic layouts are highly favourable for musical exploration, based more in intuition than overthinking. It’s also suggested that isomorphic tunings are a powerful environment for teaching and learning music.

Whatever your reason for wanting to play or design isomorphic layouts, Lumatone is the perfect instrument upon which to do it. Many (if not most) Lumatone mappings we have seen so far are either exact copies of existing isomorphic layouts, or variations on them.

Microtonal/Polychromatic Music

Microtonal music has been around since music began. Put most simply, it is a catchall term for any tuning system with notes other than the usual 12 equal divisions of the octave, or 12-tone equal temperament (12-ET). While popular western music rallied around 12-ET and it became the the most common tuning system, countless other approaches to communicating and performing music have persisted. Various cultures around the world have embraced microtonality in music, but in reality, microtonality is present in all music in the form of subtle deviations in pitch on countless instruments, such as bending guitar strings, wavering voices, and winding violins.

Pictured above: a 53-tet microtonal mapping mapped by Cam Taylor.

Also commonly called Xenharmonic music, Microtonal music has many disciplines, and there are many schools of thought about which tunings are most ideal, and how intervals best relate to each other.

The idea of creating an instrument to best help performers visualize the “notes between the notes” was the driving force that inspired Lumatone’s creators from day one. Lumatone is by far the most powerful instrument on the market for performing and composing microtonal music, largely because of it’s full customizability. While isomorphic layouts are especially powerful for microtonal layouts, any non-isomorphic layout can be custom mapped to Lumatone as well, along with any corresponding tuning.

We’ve worked with dozens of microtonal musicians over the course of designing and producing Lumatone to ensure that the instrument provides the optimal number of keys in the optimal places. The excitement around

Lumatone for performance and composition throughout the microtonal community has been inspiring and exciting! 

While our hep centre can’t act as a substitute for an education in microtonal music, there are several excellent resources listed in Appendix A of our manual that we encourage Lumatone owners to review if they are interested in pursuing this exciting way of thinking about music. Appendix B also discusses microtonal concepts in more detail.

Multi-Instrumental Layouts, Splits, Zones

A truly powerful use for Lumatone is in performance scenarios where you wish to play a number of instruments at the same time. Splits denote vertical or horizontal segmentation of the key layout, whereas zones can be any shape, fully customizable within the Lumatone editor. Lumatone excels beyond other surfaces due to the sheer number of keys available. By creating custom areas of a mapping identified with colour, you can route different MIDI channels and notes to any number of virtual instruments, synthesizers, drum machines, sequencers, and more. 

This packs any number of instruments in one large expressive playing surface, subdivided by MIDI channel and by using colour and position in just about any way you can dream up. Certain keys along the top are reserved as continuous controllers, allowing you to control any number of parameters on any instrument on the surface, easily switchable simply by changing their channel and note. 

Multi-Instrumental layouts are not only a powerful solution live, but also as a centrepiece in the studio for producers, beatmakers, film scorers, and more.

This is only the beginning...

While these are three broad category of mapping you can build for Lumatone, the possibilities are really endless. Let your mind wander and dream up the next great approach to mapping Lumatone!