9 ms·

A new type of piano keyboard: The Seaboard

119 points by jellyksong 14y ago

brownbat 14y ago
Since the site is crushed, here's a demo on youtube that seems to get some of the point across: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n-bEy9ISpM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n-bEy9ISpM
ChuckMcM 14y ago
I assume it's the way it was shot that not all of the notes that are being played start or end with movements and/or touches of the keyboard. (not being snarky, its just noticeable is all) I think its great that people are doing alternative instruments like this. For a while we've had synthesizers providing the tone generator for recreated inputs (like the laser harp) but this gives us more input options. There is another such "keyboard" which is more like a horizontal bass/chello fret than a keyboard. I played around on it when it was being demoed at Guitar Center in San Jose. As a former Trombone player it felt similar in the 'feel' of the intonation was there rather than explicitly hitting a particular key. And the ability to 'slide up' or 'slide down' into the correct not if you were close but not quite. Something I've never been able to do on a keyboard (although I have heard folks do that) One of my instruments is an Arrick synth [1] which has a 1V/octave keyboard (and input) which is handy for prototyping unusual types of input. [1] http://www.synthesizers.com http://www.synthesizers.com
- re 14y ago
  > I assume it's the way it was shot that not all of the notes that are being played start or end with movements and/or touches of the keyboard. There are two separate tracks being played back at the same time with the video cutting between the two, the bass (black room) and synth (white room). Now it feels kind of obvious to point out, but on the other hand I wasn't really conscious of it the first time I watched it. I think that's all; I'm not sure if there was anything else you noticed to indicate that some notes don't "start or end with movements".
- coldtea 14y ago
  >I assume it's the way it was shot that not all of the notes that are being played start or end with movements and/or touches of the keyboard. (not being snarky, its just noticeable is all) So you noticed that but you didn't notice that there is a track playing, and the performer lays another on top of it?
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    No I did not notice that they were in the process of laying down additional tracks. Here on Sunday the site seems to be down but the youtube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n-bEy9ISpM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n-bEy9ISpM) it still there. Listening to the upper register track (the 'white' room) I still feel the mis-match between my ear and my eyes (ignoring the base line). Its not a big deal I just noted it. There has been a lot of 'fakery' in the synth market and so that twitch is perhaps stronger than it would be for other things. When I had a Yamaha DX-11 for a while I also had the Yamaha breath controller (trying to recapture my trombone days I guess :-) but was never really satisfied with it. Later I really wanted to try a Morrison Digital Trumpet [1] but really really had a hard time spending $4K on something I might not use more than a couple of times. [1] http://www.morrisondigitaltrumpet.com/ http://www.morrisondigitaltrumpet.com/
the_cat_kittles 14y ago
I love the idea of creating new instruments that are sensitive to new and different parameters. I think the seaboard is pretty cool, and it looks like there are some things you can do with it that you can't do with traditional midi keyboards (velocity modulation after initial keypress- i think that is called aftertouch in midi land) and key specific pitch bending. But it also reminds me of one reason why analogue (acoustic) instruments can so incredibly powerful: they are ultimately extensible! You don't need to explicitly describe how the thing will react to input, and its not ignorant (though maybe not very responsive) of any physical input. Throughout history, people have been continually discovering new techniques on so many different instruments, even though some of those instrument's designs have changed very little. This is, of course, all predicated on a good initial instrumental design, but it makes me appreciate the wonders of, say, a guitar or piano even more.
- triplesec 14y ago
  I agree that a great analogue instrument is still greater, but here, given an electric predicate, this works with what keyboardists already can do, and makes it not just a percussion instrument (piano, harpsichord), or a timed note (synth), or a timed note with initial attack control (tracker action pipe organ). In other words pactically the same interface provides much more control of more variables much more easily. Whether great playing, music making and improvising can and does ensue is another issue, but I hope so.
  - the_cat_kittles 14y ago
    Its true, you can kind of think of this thing as a pareto improvement over the current midi keyboards (if you dont mind the different action)
triplesec 14y ago
A good interview by Rory Cellan Jones from the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21699459 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21699459 This looks like an awesome product, in the real sense of the word.
ccoggins 14y ago
A professor I had in college created something very similar back in the 90's. He would have them in the lab occasionally and they were pretty interesting to play. http://www.hakenaudio.com/Continuum/ http://www.hakenaudio.com/Continuum/
- zerohp 14y ago
  He is my professor now. He showed a video of Dreamtheater with it on our first day.
  - daeken 14y ago
    Interestingly, Jordan Rudess of Dream Theater is involved with this product.
baby 14y ago
I feel like most of the stuff that surround us were created THIS way because we just didn't have the technology to make it better yet. That's what I see with those new Pianos and also with the 48fps movies https://www.facebook.com/notes/peter-jackson/48-frames-per-second/10150222861171558 https://www.facebook.com/notes/peter-jackson/48-frames-per-s...
gtani 14y ago
People might want to check out Roger Linn, Ed Goldfarb, Geert Bevin (I'd really like to have a continuum and eigenharp), and actuated instruments site. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1s-neJs8IY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1s-neJs8IY http://actuatedinstruments.com/ http://actuatedinstruments.com/ ______________________ Also "That 1 guy" "Haaken continuum", Wessel's touchpads (a better Kaossilator, if you will, and Fluid Piaano http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ci6TmR29OI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ci6TmR29OI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnBhR8RLJN8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnBhR8RLJN8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_mtCZqN0Ms http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_mtCZqN0Ms http://thefluidpiano.com/ http://thefluidpiano.com/ _______________________ (I don't have any nonstandard instruments (except maybe fretless guitar) but I've thought about this as amateur player of piano/keys, guitar, strings (cello), woodwinds and former mallet percussionist, how you could combine mouthpiece and foot controllers with keyboard, how to do glisses, tremolo, vibrato etc, i.e. shape the attack/decay, timbre and pitch (continuously or as in Don Ellis' quarter tone music) like you can with cello and clarinet
mullr 14y ago
I'm very suspicious of this and related products. The thing that's really great about all our acoustic musical instruments is that when you push on them, they push back. I don't mean this simply in the normal force sense. Consider a guitar. You've got a string which you press over a fret with your left hand. This can be naively emulated by a switch. But with the guitar, the timber and pitch change depending on how you fret the note, on the finger pressure and position and motion. With your other hand, you might be plucking the string in any of a number of different places, with your finger or with a pick. The sound is affected by your attack angle, how hard you pick, the pick's composition, and so on. A guitar string is clearly a complicated system. There are lots of variables at play. But more importantly, it's a coherent system. It makes sense to us a physical object that can be manipulated. When you pluck the string, you can feel it vibrate in your fretting hand. When you bend the string its tension increases. If you amplify it, you get the sense that you are physically touching the sound. (This is incidentally, why audio latency absolutely KILLS when doing amp simulation) The experience playing a wind instrument is similar. While a saxophone may appear to be something you blow into that has keys, things are really far more complicated than that. Keyboard-based instruments are a little different. Unlike most any symphonic instrument, the piano actually has relatively few parameters per key. There's note velocity... and that's about it. The various sustain pedals also apply. The piano's design trades single note expressivity for the ability to play ten of them at once. It should be noted that computer synthesis (procedural or sampled) of keyboard-based is very convincing. They same cannot be said for any other instrument. Now, what about new kinds of control systems? Most of them tend to fall into two categories. One tries to improve on the piano harmonically, by coming up with a better arrangement of where the notes go. Here's an overview of some: http://sequence15.blogspot.jp/2010/03/alternative-keyboards.html http://sequence15.blogspot.jp/2010/03/alternative-keyboards..... They try to fix the fact that it's hard to play in different keys on a piano. Whereas on the guitar you can learn a single scale or chord and move it up and down the neck to transpose, things change radically on a piano keyboard. The second category is those like the Seaboard, which try to add new dimensions of control to a regular piano keyboard. Another example is the Contiuum (http://www.hakenaudio.com/Continuum/ http://www.hakenaudio.com/Continuum/) It's very common now to have both velocity and continuous pressure sensitivity (aftertouch) on a regular keyboard as well as various side controllers for dealing with pitch or an abstract "modulation" parameter. These controllers nearly always buy into the separation of control from synthesis. It makes perfect technical sense. But most of the instruments we would consider to be "expressive" don't work that way! In fact piano-style instruments are pretty much the only ones that do. Which leads my to my point: A control mechanism should be considered together with the instrument it controls. It's fantastic that this new keyboard has all these new dimensions that you can map to sound, but what is it REALLY good for? What is the instrument that wants to be controlled in this way? The spiffy new control surfaces nearly always leave this problem unsolved and thus remain little more than novelty items.
adventured 14y ago
Interesting product, really terrible website. I know the rolling page layouts are popular these days, but in this case it just looks bad. Lots of transparency around text, which makes some of it hard to read or focus on. The navigation at the top left should always display all the sections (I shouldn't have to mouse over the little cubes to reveal what they are). When the nav text for "technology" passes over the blue background text quote area, it nearly disappears. The grey block area with "what the press are saying" is some kind of twisted attempt at straining my eyes by putting tiny grey text on a grey block in a larger grey area. Why would anybody do that to text? The we are ROLI block near the bottom is a transparent nightmare for the text meant to be read. The form at the bottom at least pops out a bit, but still suffers from a heavy abuse of transparency with text on it.
- skore 14y ago
  I was astonished by the loading times. Click an article in the "News" section and it takes about 5-10 seconds (while looking at the huge spinner) to load. That's ages for one paragraph of text and a 900x600 .jpg. For a quick reader, the page takes longer to load than to read. That's not good.
tomsthumb 14y ago
As far as interesting musical interfaces go, the axis 64 is the most amazing thing I've ever seen from a conceptual standpoint. It's like someone just laid down the same of all of these relationships that make music work and put into something your hands can push on. What's weird is that even though it's just an /interface/ it makes the /concepts/ easy to grasp, manipulate, etc. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7OeRkXWTtQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7OeRkXWTtQ
canibanoglu 14y ago
Seen this one a couple days ago and I honestly can't understand what the hype is all about. I've been playing the piano for 11 years now and I can't see myself or any classical pianist using this product. I'm aware that this is most likely not intended for classical musicians but still, I fail to see the reason to change the design of an instrument that's been around for a very long time in one form or another. Change for the sake of change is pointless.
- klodolph 14y ago
  Sigh. I've been playing piano for... over two decades now, and additional ways of modulating synthesized sound are welcomed with open arms. There are songs I play where I wish so hard that I had polyphonic aftertouch on my keyboard, but alas, it has monophonic aftertouch only. I play a lot of classical, and I even want modulation there. Your concerns... they are carbon copies of the same complaints people had about the introduction of the piano in the early 18th century! Nowadays, the idea that you'd play "The Well-Tempered Clavier" on anything BUT a piano relegates you to a niche in classical (or rather baroque) music, despite the fact that the songs were written for the harpsichord. The assumption that the piano will be how we play Beethoven 50 years from now -- well, I'm sure the piano will still be alive and well in 2063... Instruments come and go, it's the music that lives on.
  - canibanoglu 14y ago
    The jump from the harpsichord to piano was a huge one but the key profile didn't change as much as this. Integrating new technologies with instruments is all good and dandy but we're now fabricating the sounds with computers. We're changing the way these instruments function and we're changing the way we interact with them. My concerns may be similar to those of 18th century people but the changes that we're experiencing now are not similar to the changes they experienced. We don't have the technology to replicate the acoustic sound of a piano. And I quite honestly don't see this being used to perform classical music. I'm not talking about all the stuff (mind you, I'm very partial to calling these music) that's being "composed" these days, I'm talking about the music up to the 1950s. I'd like to touch on another aspect of your post, you say that you want modulation and polyphonic aftertouch when you play the piano. And you say that it's the music that lives on. For classical music, the music is the composer's, s/he composed the music with the limitations of his/her era and re-interpreting their music with new technologies in ways they didn't even imagine. This is not making their music live on as far as I'm concerned. Basically my point is that, considering that I only play classical music, I don't see a use for this. It's good to read about it but I don't think that this will ever be used for classical music performance. And no, I don't mean the odd youtube videos here and there, I mean used for performance by concert pianists. I believe I'm entitled to my opinion about this. It's a cool piece of tech but it's just that. The fact that Jordan Rudess from DT endorses this doesn't mean anything to me. He's not a classical music performer (although he has been educated as one) and this may be good for his uses. I'll be amazed if Martha Argerich or Maurizio Pollini say that they will use this product. And just a little note, and I know this can sound like I'm attacking you but I'm not, I'm just trying to share a bit of information. The pieces in The Well-Tempered Clavier are not "songs" per se, they are individual pieces. Song is another form in classical music and employs the use of human voice.
Tekker 14y ago
Although the comments seem against it, I'm for it - I've played piano (and organ) for some 45 years now. You have to remember that the piano is mainly a percussion instrument, and there are few options to temper the sound, outside of sustain and such. Synthesizers have had the same capability as shown in the video, but you had to reach to the side and twirl a wheel to get the same effect, which detracts from the playability. Initially, this is not suited for traditional classical (probably better for jazz) but who's to say someone couldn't write a new classical based on this instrument (although goodness knows what the musical notation would be).
jdietrich 14y ago
They've got excellent PR, but they're not doing anything particularly novel. They're advertising a solution to a long-solved part of the puzzle, but saying nothing about the really difficult bit of electronic music control - interoperability. A quick bit of synthesiser history: Traditional electronic keyboards sense how hard you hit the key with two switches, set a distance apart vertically. Measure the time between each switch closing and you have one side of v=d/t. Simple, cheap and all you need for controlling an emulation of a piano. That was improved by adding aftertouch, a simple pressure strip underneath the keybed which provided an additional axis of control. That approach evolved quite quickly, peaking in 1976 with Yamaha's CS-80 synthesiser, which could sense both vertical and horizontal pressure on each key polyphonically. This was a hugely elaborate and expensive instrument but was extremely expressive, as best heard on Vangelis' soundtrack to Blade Runner. Progress in this field came to a grinding halt in 1983, with the release of MIDI, an interoperable standard for electronic music instruments that became completely ubiquitous. MIDI was a tremendous breakthrough and made all sorts of previously very difficult things quite easy, but it had all of the usual failings of a successful standard. MIDI has left us stuck with design decisions from 1983, the worst of these being the incredibly low data-rate. MIDI is an 8-bit protocol, operating at 31.25kbaud. The standard doesn't include any means of transmitting expression data other than velocity on a per-note basis. You can bend the pitch of all the notes currently sounding, but not one note out of a chord. If you try and send too much controller information over a channel, the timing goes to pot as you run out of bandwidth. There's an obvious problem of platform lock-in, which nobody seems able to break - a controller of this type can't usefully control any existing sound source. There are numerous extant controllers of similar sophistication to the Seaboard, but they've all failed commercially because of their inability to usefully control existing sound generators. The hoped-for solution to this problem is the Open Sound Control protocol, but this faces numerous problems. The most obvious is that MIDI is deeply entrenched, to the point that its shortcomings are rendered non-obvious to most musicians - our sense of the boundaries of electronic music are often inseperable from the limits of MIDI, so we don't often think about the sounds that we're unable to make with current technology. The other big issue is that of all reforms of old standards - an inability to manage scope and complexity. The developers of OSC are obviously fearful of repeating the problems of MIDI, so they've gone in completely the opposite direction and designed a totally open-ended protocol. This has massively limited adoption of OSC by musicians, because it's extremely difficult to understand. A MIDI message is just a single byte and it's not too difficult to memorise the entire protocol - until the development of graphical computer-based sequencers, it was quite common to tidy up a recorded sequence of MIDI messages in a hex editor - any given MIDI message was just a single octet. OSC is designed to deal with every possible edge case, which of course makes it needlessly complex for the most common use-cases. Controllers like these are doomed to niche appeal unless the manufacturers focus on the real problem - how to use the control data they generate in a manner which is both musically useful, and comprehensible to the musician. The last major attempt was the Eigenharp, which used a bespoke software suite with a number of software instruments specifically designed for the instrument. It garnered a great deal of attention in the popular press, but nobody has made any worthwhile music with it yet.
Kiro 14y ago
Why all this negativity? I think it looks awesome and I want to buy one right now.
- smosher 14y ago
  The reason their product hasn't been dominating the market for the past 20 years is not because they were the first to dream it up (they weren't, though there appear to be some incremental improvements here), it's because you can't get it to talk to the other $50k+ worth of equipment in your studio.
  - Kiro 14y ago
    The only piece of hardware in most studios is the computer. I don't see any problems getting it to work with my DAW and synths through USB.
    - smosher 14y ago
      That doesn't add up, unless you're counting everyone with a trial version of fruity loops on their system as having a studio. But even then, I think it's a stretch (everyone I know who does any kind of music production has at least $1k in non-computer hardware.) How exactly do you expect to get this to work with your existing tools? It's obviously not usefully MIDI-compatible.
      - shardling 14y ago
        A guitar or piano isn't MIDI compatible, and that hardly matters. If the instrument could really stand on its own, then compatibility isn't a problem.
        smosher 14y ago
        Sure, but when you depend on synthesis compatibility is a big deal. History seems to support that, with respect to other novel electronic instruments. I was just now responding to a claim that this will work with existing synthesizers. While I would like to have this kind of control, I would much rather have the flexibility that a standard MIDI keyboard with aftertouch affords with respect to synthesis.
andrewcooke 14y ago
the site seems to be mostly down; the demo video is here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n-bEy9ISpM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n-bEy9ISpM
khromov 14y ago
Looks like something from a Cronenberg movie!
hfsktr 14y ago
The cached version worked but the site kept giving me 403 errors. Unfortunately I know so little of music/keyboards that I couldn't really tell the difference between this and any other keyboard.
paperkettle 14y ago
http://madronalabs.com/ http://madronalabs.com/ makes something called the Soundplane - it feels like a present someone sent me from the future. So nice to touch. A high resolution / super responsive controller.. of wood! Maybe I'm just not enough of a cyborg but the wood surface made the Haken Continuum (wetsuit material) far less compelling. I worry the same thing of the Seaboard.
danpalmer 14y ago
I'm not musical – I can't play an instrument and I don't analyse the music I listen to. But I like listening to music, and to me, this sounds worse than a normal keyboard/piano. It looks (and sounds) really difficult to produce a precise note with, so I wonder if it will take off at all.

119 points by jellyksong 14y ago

Since the site is crushed, here's a demo on youtube that seems to get some of the point across: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n-bEy9ISpM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n-bEy9ISpM

ChuckMcM 14y ago

I assume it's the way it was shot that not all of the notes that are being played start or end with movements and/or touches of the keyboard. (not being snarky, its just noticeable is all) I think its great that people are doing alternative instruments like this. For a while we've had synthesizers providing the tone generator for recreated inputs (like the laser harp) but this gives us more input options. There is another such "keyboard" which is more like a horizontal bass/chello fret than a keyboard. I played around on it when it was being demoed at Guitar Center in San Jose. As a former Trombone player it felt similar in the 'feel' of the intonation was there rather than explicitly hitting a particular key. And the ability to 'slide up' or 'slide down' into the correct not if you were close but not quite. Something I've never been able to do on a keyboard (although I have heard folks do that) One of my instruments is an Arrick synth [1] which has a 1V/octave keyboard (and input) which is handy for prototyping unusual types of input. [1] http://www.synthesizers.com http://www.synthesizers.com

re 14y ago
> I assume it's the way it was shot that not all of the notes that are being played start or end with movements and/or touches of the keyboard. There are two separate tracks being played back at the same time with the video cutting between the two, the bass (black room) and synth (white room). Now it feels kind of obvious to point out, but on the other hand I wasn't really conscious of it the first time I watched it. I think that's all; I'm not sure if there was anything else you noticed to indicate that some notes don't "start or end with movements".
coldtea 14y ago
>I assume it's the way it was shot that not all of the notes that are being played start or end with movements and/or touches of the keyboard. (not being snarky, its just noticeable is all) So you noticed that but you didn't notice that there is a track playing, and the performer lays another on top of it?
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  No I did not notice that they were in the process of laying down additional tracks. Here on Sunday the site seems to be down but the youtube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n-bEy9ISpM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n-bEy9ISpM) it still there. Listening to the upper register track (the 'white' room) I still feel the mis-match between my ear and my eyes (ignoring the base line). Its not a big deal I just noted it. There has been a lot of 'fakery' in the synth market and so that twitch is perhaps stronger than it would be for other things. When I had a Yamaha DX-11 for a while I also had the Yamaha breath controller (trying to recapture my trombone days I guess :-) but was never really satisfied with it. Later I really wanted to try a Morrison Digital Trumpet [1] but really really had a hard time spending $4K on something I might not use more than a couple of times. [1] http://www.morrisondigitaltrumpet.com/ http://www.morrisondigitaltrumpet.com/

the_cat_kittles 14y ago

I love the idea of creating new instruments that are sensitive to new and different parameters. I think the seaboard is pretty cool, and it looks like there are some things you can do with it that you can't do with traditional midi keyboards (velocity modulation after initial keypress- i think that is called aftertouch in midi land) and key specific pitch bending. But it also reminds me of one reason why analogue (acoustic) instruments can so incredibly powerful: they are ultimately extensible! You don't need to explicitly describe how the thing will react to input, and its not ignorant (though maybe not very responsive) of any physical input. Throughout history, people have been continually discovering new techniques on so many different instruments, even though some of those instrument's designs have changed very little. This is, of course, all predicated on a good initial instrumental design, but it makes me appreciate the wonders of, say, a guitar or piano even more.

triplesec 14y ago
I agree that a great analogue instrument is still greater, but here, given an electric predicate, this works with what keyboardists already can do, and makes it not just a percussion instrument (piano, harpsichord), or a timed note (synth), or a timed note with initial attack control (tracker action pipe organ). In other words pactically the same interface provides much more control of more variables much more easily. Whether great playing, music making and improvising can and does ensue is another issue, but I hope so.
- the_cat_kittles 14y ago
  Its true, you can kind of think of this thing as a pareto improvement over the current midi keyboards (if you dont mind the different action)

triplesec 14y ago

A good interview by Rory Cellan Jones from the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21699459 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21699459 This looks like an awesome product, in the real sense of the word.

ccoggins 14y ago

A professor I had in college created something very similar back in the 90's. He would have them in the lab occasionally and they were pretty interesting to play. http://www.hakenaudio.com/Continuum/ http://www.hakenaudio.com/Continuum/

zerohp 14y ago
He is my professor now. He showed a video of Dreamtheater with it on our first day.
- daeken 14y ago
  Interestingly, Jordan Rudess of Dream Theater is involved with this product.

baby 14y ago

I feel like most of the stuff that surround us were created THIS way because we just didn't have the technology to make it better yet. That's what I see with those new Pianos and also with the 48fps movies https://www.facebook.com/notes/peter-jackson/48-frames-per-second/10150222861171558 https://www.facebook.com/notes/peter-jackson/48-frames-per-s...

gtani 14y ago

People might want to check out Roger Linn, Ed Goldfarb, Geert Bevin (I'd really like to have a continuum and eigenharp), and actuated instruments site. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1s-neJs8IY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1s-neJs8IY http://actuatedinstruments.com/ http://actuatedinstruments.com/ ______________________ Also "That 1 guy" "Haaken continuum", Wessel's touchpads (a better Kaossilator, if you will, and Fluid Piaano http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ci6TmR29OI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ci6TmR29OI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnBhR8RLJN8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnBhR8RLJN8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_mtCZqN0Ms http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_mtCZqN0Ms http://thefluidpiano.com/ http://thefluidpiano.com/ _______________________ (I don't have any nonstandard instruments (except maybe fretless guitar) but I've thought about this as amateur player of piano/keys, guitar, strings (cello), woodwinds and former mallet percussionist, how you could combine mouthpiece and foot controllers with keyboard, how to do glisses, tremolo, vibrato etc, i.e. shape the attack/decay, timbre and pitch (continuously or as in Don Ellis' quarter tone music) like you can with cello and clarinet

mullr 14y ago

I'm very suspicious of this and related products. The thing that's really great about all our acoustic musical instruments is that when you push on them, they push back. I don't mean this simply in the normal force sense. Consider a guitar. You've got a string which you press over a fret with your left hand. This can be naively emulated by a switch. But with the guitar, the timber and pitch change depending on how you fret the note, on the finger pressure and position and motion. With your other hand, you might be plucking the string in any of a number of different places, with your finger or with a pick. The sound is affected by your attack angle, how hard you pick, the pick's composition, and so on. A guitar string is clearly a complicated system. There are lots of variables at play. But more importantly, it's a coherent system. It makes sense to us a physical object that can be manipulated. When you pluck the string, you can feel it vibrate in your fretting hand. When you bend the string its tension increases. If you amplify it, you get the sense that you are physically touching the sound. (This is incidentally, why audio latency absolutely KILLS when doing amp simulation) The experience playing a wind instrument is similar. While a saxophone may appear to be something you blow into that has keys, things are really far more complicated than that. Keyboard-based instruments are a little different. Unlike most any symphonic instrument, the piano actually has relatively few parameters per key. There's note velocity... and that's about it. The various sustain pedals also apply. The piano's design trades single note expressivity for the ability to play ten of them at once. It should be noted that computer synthesis (procedural or sampled) of keyboard-based is very convincing. They same cannot be said for any other instrument. Now, what about new kinds of control systems? Most of them tend to fall into two categories. One tries to improve on the piano harmonically, by coming up with a better arrangement of where the notes go. Here's an overview of some: http://sequence15.blogspot.jp/2010/03/alternative-keyboards.html http://sequence15.blogspot.jp/2010/03/alternative-keyboards..... They try to fix the fact that it's hard to play in different keys on a piano. Whereas on the guitar you can learn a single scale or chord and move it up and down the neck to transpose, things change radically on a piano keyboard. The second category is those like the Seaboard, which try to add new dimensions of control to a regular piano keyboard. Another example is the Contiuum (http://www.hakenaudio.com/Continuum/ http://www.hakenaudio.com/Continuum/) It's very common now to have both velocity and continuous pressure sensitivity (aftertouch) on a regular keyboard as well as various side controllers for dealing with pitch or an abstract "modulation" parameter. These controllers nearly always buy into the separation of control from synthesis. It makes perfect technical sense. But most of the instruments we would consider to be "expressive" don't work that way! In fact piano-style instruments are pretty much the only ones that do. Which leads my to my point: A control mechanism should be considered together with the instrument it controls. It's fantastic that this new keyboard has all these new dimensions that you can map to sound, but what is it REALLY good for? What is the instrument that wants to be controlled in this way? The spiffy new control surfaces nearly always leave this problem unsolved and thus remain little more than novelty items.

adventured 14y ago

Interesting product, really terrible website. I know the rolling page layouts are popular these days, but in this case it just looks bad. Lots of transparency around text, which makes some of it hard to read or focus on. The navigation at the top left should always display all the sections (I shouldn't have to mouse over the little cubes to reveal what they are). When the nav text for "technology" passes over the blue background text quote area, it nearly disappears. The grey block area with "what the press are saying" is some kind of twisted attempt at straining my eyes by putting tiny grey text on a grey block in a larger grey area. Why would anybody do that to text? The we are ROLI block near the bottom is a transparent nightmare for the text meant to be read. The form at the bottom at least pops out a bit, but still suffers from a heavy abuse of transparency with text on it.

skore 14y ago
I was astonished by the loading times. Click an article in the "News" section and it takes about 5-10 seconds (while looking at the huge spinner) to load. That's ages for one paragraph of text and a 900x600 .jpg. For a quick reader, the page takes longer to load than to read. That's not good.

tomsthumb 14y ago

As far as interesting musical interfaces go, the axis 64 is the most amazing thing I've ever seen from a conceptual standpoint. It's like someone just laid down the same of all of these relationships that make music work and put into something your hands can push on. What's weird is that even though it's just an /interface/ it makes the /concepts/ easy to grasp, manipulate, etc. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7OeRkXWTtQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7OeRkXWTtQ

canibanoglu 14y ago

Seen this one a couple days ago and I honestly can't understand what the hype is all about. I've been playing the piano for 11 years now and I can't see myself or any classical pianist using this product. I'm aware that this is most likely not intended for classical musicians but still, I fail to see the reason to change the design of an instrument that's been around for a very long time in one form or another. Change for the sake of change is pointless.

klodolph 14y ago
Sigh. I've been playing piano for... over two decades now, and additional ways of modulating synthesized sound are welcomed with open arms. There are songs I play where I wish so hard that I had polyphonic aftertouch on my keyboard, but alas, it has monophonic aftertouch only. I play a lot of classical, and I even want modulation there. Your concerns... they are carbon copies of the same complaints people had about the introduction of the piano in the early 18th century! Nowadays, the idea that you'd play "The Well-Tempered Clavier" on anything BUT a piano relegates you to a niche in classical (or rather baroque) music, despite the fact that the songs were written for the harpsichord. The assumption that the piano will be how we play Beethoven 50 years from now -- well, I'm sure the piano will still be alive and well in 2063... Instruments come and go, it's the music that lives on.
- canibanoglu 14y ago
  The jump from the harpsichord to piano was a huge one but the key profile didn't change as much as this. Integrating new technologies with instruments is all good and dandy but we're now fabricating the sounds with computers. We're changing the way these instruments function and we're changing the way we interact with them. My concerns may be similar to those of 18th century people but the changes that we're experiencing now are not similar to the changes they experienced. We don't have the technology to replicate the acoustic sound of a piano. And I quite honestly don't see this being used to perform classical music. I'm not talking about all the stuff (mind you, I'm very partial to calling these music) that's being "composed" these days, I'm talking about the music up to the 1950s. I'd like to touch on another aspect of your post, you say that you want modulation and polyphonic aftertouch when you play the piano. And you say that it's the music that lives on. For classical music, the music is the composer's, s/he composed the music with the limitations of his/her era and re-interpreting their music with new technologies in ways they didn't even imagine. This is not making their music live on as far as I'm concerned. Basically my point is that, considering that I only play classical music, I don't see a use for this. It's good to read about it but I don't think that this will ever be used for classical music performance. And no, I don't mean the odd youtube videos here and there, I mean used for performance by concert pianists. I believe I'm entitled to my opinion about this. It's a cool piece of tech but it's just that. The fact that Jordan Rudess from DT endorses this doesn't mean anything to me. He's not a classical music performer (although he has been educated as one) and this may be good for his uses. I'll be amazed if Martha Argerich or Maurizio Pollini say that they will use this product. And just a little note, and I know this can sound like I'm attacking you but I'm not, I'm just trying to share a bit of information. The pieces in The Well-Tempered Clavier are not "songs" per se, they are individual pieces. Song is another form in classical music and employs the use of human voice.

Tekker 14y ago

Although the comments seem against it, I'm for it - I've played piano (and organ) for some 45 years now. You have to remember that the piano is mainly a percussion instrument, and there are few options to temper the sound, outside of sustain and such. Synthesizers have had the same capability as shown in the video, but you had to reach to the side and twirl a wheel to get the same effect, which detracts from the playability. Initially, this is not suited for traditional classical (probably better for jazz) but who's to say someone couldn't write a new classical based on this instrument (although goodness knows what the musical notation would be).

jdietrich 14y ago

They've got excellent PR, but they're not doing anything particularly novel. They're advertising a solution to a long-solved part of the puzzle, but saying nothing about the really difficult bit of electronic music control - interoperability. A quick bit of synthesiser history: Traditional electronic keyboards sense how hard you hit the key with two switches, set a distance apart vertically. Measure the time between each switch closing and you have one side of v=d/t. Simple, cheap and all you need for controlling an emulation of a piano. That was improved by adding aftertouch, a simple pressure strip underneath the keybed which provided an additional axis of control. That approach evolved quite quickly, peaking in 1976 with Yamaha's CS-80 synthesiser, which could sense both vertical and horizontal pressure on each key polyphonically. This was a hugely elaborate and expensive instrument but was extremely expressive, as best heard on Vangelis' soundtrack to Blade Runner. Progress in this field came to a grinding halt in 1983, with the release of MIDI, an interoperable standard for electronic music instruments that became completely ubiquitous. MIDI was a tremendous breakthrough and made all sorts of previously very difficult things quite easy, but it had all of the usual failings of a successful standard. MIDI has left us stuck with design decisions from 1983, the worst of these being the incredibly low data-rate. MIDI is an 8-bit protocol, operating at 31.25kbaud. The standard doesn't include any means of transmitting expression data other than velocity on a per-note basis. You can bend the pitch of all the notes currently sounding, but not one note out of a chord. If you try and send too much controller information over a channel, the timing goes to pot as you run out of bandwidth. There's an obvious problem of platform lock-in, which nobody seems able to break - a controller of this type can't usefully control any existing sound source. There are numerous extant controllers of similar sophistication to the Seaboard, but they've all failed commercially because of their inability to usefully control existing sound generators. The hoped-for solution to this problem is the Open Sound Control protocol, but this faces numerous problems. The most obvious is that MIDI is deeply entrenched, to the point that its shortcomings are rendered non-obvious to most musicians - our sense of the boundaries of electronic music are often inseperable from the limits of MIDI, so we don't often think about the sounds that we're unable to make with current technology. The other big issue is that of all reforms of old standards - an inability to manage scope and complexity. The developers of OSC are obviously fearful of repeating the problems of MIDI, so they've gone in completely the opposite direction and designed a totally open-ended protocol. This has massively limited adoption of OSC by musicians, because it's extremely difficult to understand. A MIDI message is just a single byte and it's not too difficult to memorise the entire protocol - until the development of graphical computer-based sequencers, it was quite common to tidy up a recorded sequence of MIDI messages in a hex editor - any given MIDI message was just a single octet. OSC is designed to deal with every possible edge case, which of course makes it needlessly complex for the most common use-cases. Controllers like these are doomed to niche appeal unless the manufacturers focus on the real problem - how to use the control data they generate in a manner which is both musically useful, and comprehensible to the musician. The last major attempt was the Eigenharp, which used a bespoke software suite with a number of software instruments specifically designed for the instrument. It garnered a great deal of attention in the popular press, but nobody has made any worthwhile music with it yet.

Kiro 14y ago

Why all this negativity? I think it looks awesome and I want to buy one right now.

smosher 14y ago
The reason their product hasn't been dominating the market for the past 20 years is not because they were the first to dream it up (they weren't, though there appear to be some incremental improvements here), it's because you can't get it to talk to the other $50k+ worth of equipment in your studio.
- Kiro 14y ago
  The only piece of hardware in most studios is the computer. I don't see any problems getting it to work with my DAW and synths through USB.
  - smosher 14y ago
    That doesn't add up, unless you're counting everyone with a trial version of fruity loops on their system as having a studio. But even then, I think it's a stretch (everyone I know who does any kind of music production has at least $1k in non-computer hardware.) How exactly do you expect to get this to work with your existing tools? It's obviously not usefully MIDI-compatible.
    - shardling 14y ago
      A guitar or piano isn't MIDI compatible, and that hardly matters. If the instrument could really stand on its own, then compatibility isn't a problem.
      - smosher 14y ago
        Sure, but when you depend on synthesis compatibility is a big deal. History seems to support that, with respect to other novel electronic instruments. I was just now responding to a claim that this will work with existing synthesizers. While I would like to have this kind of control, I would much rather have the flexibility that a standard MIDI keyboard with aftertouch affords with respect to synthesis.

andrewcooke 14y ago

the site seems to be mostly down; the demo video is here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n-bEy9ISpM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n-bEy9ISpM

khromov 14y ago

Looks like something from a Cronenberg movie!

hfsktr 14y ago

The cached version worked but the site kept giving me 403 errors. Unfortunately I know so little of music/keyboards that I couldn't really tell the difference between this and any other keyboard.

paperkettle 14y ago

http://madronalabs.com/ http://madronalabs.com/ makes something called the Soundplane - it feels like a present someone sent me from the future. So nice to touch. A high resolution / super responsive controller.. of wood! Maybe I'm just not enough of a cyborg but the wood surface made the Haken Continuum (wetsuit material) far less compelling. I worry the same thing of the Seaboard.

danpalmer 14y ago

I'm not musical – I can't play an instrument and I don't analyse the music I listen to. But I like listening to music, and to me, this sounds worse than a normal keyboard/piano. It looks (and sounds) really difficult to produce a precise note with, so I wonder if it will take off at all.