You’d be surprised how little innovation there is in music technology. Most guitarists play instruments that haven’t changed for 50 years. Sampling has been around for 20 years, MIDI slightly longer than that. And the vast, vast majority of electronic musicians play piano-style keyboards whose layout hasn’t changed much since 1450. Fortunately, this hasn’t stopped people trying to come up with alternatives. The fantastically simple, robust and easy-to-hack MIDI standard means that it’s easy to build controllers. It’s just slightly harder to persuade anyone to use them.

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000947033410/