New instrument scales musical heights

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8295813.stm

by acangiano • 17 years ago

59 47 17 years ago

news.bbc.co.uk

acangiano5• 17 years ago

I have a funny story surrounding the Eigenharp.

A few nights ago I was having last minute doubts about the original name we had picked for our startup. At a certain point, while brainstorming new names with a Dutch/Vietnamese friend, I came up with Eigenlabs. A quick search on Google led me to a site where weird instruments were being sold. "Argh, it's already taken, oh well". Fast forward two days, and I find the article I submitted here, on Reddit. "Hmmm, these instruments look familiar...". A quick Google search confirms that the company producing them is... Eigenlabs. What are the odds? :) baader_meinhof_count += 1.

tfh• 17 years ago

what do you mean with baader meinhof count += 1 ?

acangiano5• 17 years ago

Have you ever said "That's odd, I just learned about this obscure fact/company/place/concept the other day and now it popped up again". That's the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. So I increased the counter of my Baader-Meinhof occurrences. By the way, you'll hear about this again in a few days. :)

RK• 17 years ago

http://www.eigenlabs.com/

unalone• 17 years ago

I wish they'd have played a different song. While the instrument looks impressive, playing a generic sounding piece of rock means I can't help but wonder if three people couldn't have played the same piece with older instruments.

jessewmc• 17 years ago

If you want to compare, the song they are covering is Extreme Ways by Moby.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8eV7suSA4k&feature=fvste...

tobych• 17 years ago

I'd be hugely embarrassed to be seen playing one of those things. It's like some kids' movie-tied toy gone huge and gone wrong. Especially with all those flashing lights wizzing up and down the fretboard. Ridiculous.

acangiano5• 17 years ago

So you are saying that this is the Segway of musical instruments.

DougWebb• 17 years ago

My first thought was that they looked like the cantina band from Star Wars.

bodhi• 17 years ago

Someone else was thinking along the same lines:

http://tweetphoto.com/xgt7ahyp

paulodeon2• 17 years ago

Those flashing lights are simply the way the device communicates with the user. (Presumably) in the absence of haptic feedback on the controls the device needs to feedback what it is doing to the user visually. Without screens the current method of doing that is through flashing lights. Controlling pretty much anything complex and electronic will involve some flashing lights.

It looks as if some serious thought has been given to the usability of the device for music production. If the device succeeds in allowing the musician to produce more complex, interesting and diverse sounds, everyone will be playing one, and you'll be eating your hat ;)

chaosmachine• 17 years ago

So it's a midi guitar with a breath controller and built in synth/drum machine?

pohl• 17 years ago

...and the ghost of Keytar's past come back to avenge decades of disrespect?

I wonder how the notes are laid out on the board. It would be cool to play with one for a while.

However, the demonstration didn't exactly live up to the title. I was expecting music beyond Franz Liszt's transcendental etudes or something.

baddox2• 17 years ago

Yeah, calling it an "instrument" is incorrect. It's a controller, plain and simple. It is a pretty cool one, granted.

kstenson• 17 years ago

This looks interesting, I like the combination of drums, synth and woodwind.

I think this would be a great instrument to use if you were playing electro or other types of sampled music live as you would be able to actually play it, and not spend most of the gig standing behind a laptop and some synths.

paulodeon2• 17 years ago

What this is and what's exciting about it is that it's a new human-computer-inteface designed solely for producing synthesized music.

Think about what we had before: Midi keyboards, Midi guitars, keyboards and mice, a few more interesting control surfaces and not much else.

Sure the keyboards and guitars would be good for producing keyboard and guitar sounds, but what we needed was a way to control the gamut of sounds that can be produced by a computer in a unified way. This could well be it...

Agreed, their demo was poor, but Les Paul was no Jimi Hendrix either.

I would be interested to see what sort of software comes with it and how reprogrammable it is.

parenthesis• 17 years ago

Yes, it isn't an `instrument', it's a human-computer-interface for musical purposes, as you say.

One of the great advantages of computer music is the complete decoupling of sound generation from any particular human means of controlling it. Unfortunately, because they can be manufactured so cheaply, keyboards (in the piano or organ sense) dominate as a real-time control device. (A lot of them don't even have channel aftertouch, never mind polyphonic aftertouch!)

Not that there has been a shortage of activity in this area: there's a conference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Interfaces_for_Musical_Expr... and many niche companies making niche products, but nothing has ever really taken off.

chancho2• 17 years ago

I think it's just an optimized combination of pre-existing control methods. Keys with aftertouch, breath control and some touch surfaces. Evolutionary, not revolutionary.

what we needed was a way to control the gamut of sounds that can be produced by a computer in a unified way

That's a bit like asking for a way to control the gamut of images that can be produced on a canvas in a unified way. There are 1445068800 possible 1-second-long CD quality recordings. Most sound like white noise. I think what they're going for is not to span the whole range of sounds, but the whole range of familiar music, plus-or-minus a little.

panic• 17 years ago

Assuming a sampling rate of 44100 samples per second, and 16-bit PCM, there are actually (2^16)^44100 possible 1-second-long, CD-quality recordings (which is way, way more than 1445068800).

ugh• 17 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJhiY3oQRIk

Some more info. Their website is rather low on content so you will have to sit through such a video if you want to know more.

zandorg3• 17 years ago

Definitely, a good video! We get to see features such as a 16-note sequencer.

zandorg3• 17 years ago

Someone call Rob Hubbard! Sounds like a Commodore 64 tune.

But seriously, it's really cool, and I hope it sells well.

chancho2• 17 years ago

I didn't know Rob Hubbard scored the Bourne trilogy.

4buot• 17 years ago

I think it's a Moby song, not sure though.

jerf• 17 years ago

"Sounds like a Commodore 64 tune."

It's hard to know whether it really sounds like that or not. The media was fairly heavily compressed to the point where the human voices were obviously heavily distorted, let alone the output of the instrument itself. An actual-factual violin would hardly have fared better.

If anyone knows where to get much higher fidelity recordings I'd be interested, though I'd expect it "just" sounds like a high-end synthesizer.

elblanco2• 17 years ago

Neat. I'd buy one for a couple hundred dollars...3950GBP!!!

overzeroe• 17 years ago

Agreed. I'd buy one for $400, maybe, but for ~$5500? That's a bit too much.

Also, while others on this thread seem to think it's very Star-Wars-y and ugly, I personally think it looks rather cool. Nothing wrong with the looks.

Wonder how hard it would be to learn though.

zhyder• 17 years ago

http://www.eigenlabs.com/pico/ is their smaller and less intimidating version for £349.

nathanwdavis• 17 years ago

The demonstration was something that three regular keyboardists could have done. nothing extraordinary, but it does have a coolness factor.

jberryman• 17 years ago

I wasn't able to listen to the audio unfortunately, but visually I instantly thought of a guitar equivalent of the Ondes Martenot:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ondes_Martenot

An instrument you've heard dozens of times. Also used by Varese, Messiaen and other 20th century composers

_bfhp• 17 years ago

Are those three players part of any band? Are there any albums out using this instrument yet? I'd love to hear more of it.

modeless2• 17 years ago

What's that song they play? The beginning sounds really familiar but I can't place it.

thisisnotmyname• 17 years ago

Its extreme ways by Moby: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8eV7suSA4k

modeless2• 17 years ago

And it's the song from the end of The Bourne Identity. Thanks!

aboodman• 17 years ago

My initial reaction to this is that while I'm excited to see innovation in this space, this doesn't look so much like synthesis of something new, as much as aggregation of everything that already exist.

This isn't a single, new, interesting idea. It's more taking the old ideas and mashing them together.

It's like when you build an app without a single killer feature, and instead keep throwing in odds and ends.

I think it would be neater to focus on one or two of the new novel ideas here and really refine them.

kwamenum86• 17 years ago

This instrument looks incredible and I kind of want one but it is clear that is has a sick learning curve. These guys were not even all that great playing the instruments. It sounded like they were missing notes and fumbling around at times. Hearing that composition produced by 3 identical instruments was pretty neat though.

clutchski• 17 years ago

the real question: will it help a musician mate?

baddox2• 17 years ago

I am very bothered by how he said "synthesizer."

dmoney• 17 years ago

I would stand in line for this.

zck• 17 years ago

Because of the way it's held, and because the keys are tapped, it reminds me of the Chapman Stick: http://stick.com/ , which, beyond being an instrument in its own right, was used as the baliset in Dune.

New instrument scales musical heights

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