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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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).
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!)
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.
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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'd feel like I was missing out on something. My take is that it's simply a hair over engineered for the level of expressiveness most musicians will be able to play with. Build the same thing at a lower fidelity, sell it at 1/4 the price and maybe it'll take off. Right now, it's the price of really high end traditional instruments. And the next step down is a 10 penny whistle.
In the mass production industry, the first users traditionally pay off R&D at a high price, and then you reduce and sell to everyone else once costs are recovered.
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.