Spanning from the early Musical Telegraph and Electronic Sackbut, to the late EMS Synthi AKS and Moog Synthesizers, electronic music and musical controllers, particularly the keyboards, have enabled people from all walks of life and all around the world to produce and manipulate sound as a mean for creativity, expressions, and shared experience. Note that most of the expressive keyboard interfaces to date rest on a rigid and heavy structure. On the other hand, textiles are ubiquitous in our daily life. They are highly formable and palpable materials with a broad spectrum of patterns, structures, and textures, making them a great candidate for physical interfaces.

Inspired by theremin's expressive controls and the soft and deformable tactile properties of knitted textiles, we have developed an interactive textile-based musical interface with a familiar layout of piano keys. The KnittedKeyboard combines both discrete controls from the conventional keystrokes and expressive continuous controls from the non-contact theremin-inspired proximity sensors by waving and hovering on the air, as well as unique physical interactions enabled by the integrated fabric sensors (e.g. squeezing, pulling, stretching, and twisting). It allows performers to experience fabric-based multimodal embodied interaction and unique, intimate and organic tactile experience as they explore the seamless texture and materiality of the electronic textile.