Here’s an interesting thread:
Promoters of isometric layouts frequently talk about how easy it is to transpose a chord or scale up or down. While this is a logical setup, I question whether it is a musical setup. Parallelism, in western music theory, is considered bad. Because the individual voices lose their independence and voice-leading goes out the window.
That doesn’t preclude you from playing with proper voice-leading / counterpoint on an isometric keyboard. However, many of the videos of isomorphic keyboard performers featured them shifting chords and motives in parallel. And I only found a couple examples of voice-independent playing in the videos I watched. One of them featured someone playing a Bach 2-part invention with an isomorphic layout on an iPad.
For better or worse, western music and western music theory are tied pretty closely to the traditional piano keyboard layout. I’m trying to imagine how much work it’d take to approach my current piano-chops…on a different keyboard layout. Seems like mental gymnastics, the kind of thing you would do to avoid getting Alzheimer’s.