"It's really information-rich" Leon Csernohlavek

This article was taken from the April 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.

<p style="text-align: left;" class="REGULARSExchange-BodyCopyJustified">A piano has 12 notes.


Roland Lamb, the CEO of technology startup Roli, wanted more options. "As a keyboard player, I love the piano and think it's the most logical instrument. But I was always interested in extending its power. I'd play gigs and be slightly envious of the musicians who could bend the pitch and volume and timbre of the notes -- guitar players can be very expressive with just a few notes.

You can't do that with a piano." So three years ago, he set out to create one that could. The result is the Seaboard, a touch-sensitive, silicone keyboard that lets you slide between, bend and vibrate notes. It is, he says, "a new instrument that gets you one step closer to the experience of touching sound."

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<p style="text-align: left;" class="REGULARSExchange-BodyCopyJustified">Lamb, 34, a graduate of the Royal College of Art, first considered a mechanical solution, but didn't feel "it would be intuitive enough -- it had to build on the skills and muscle memory a piano player has." He also rejected touch screens, as they didn't offer enough tactile feedback. The solution came while he was at a literary festival in Jaipur, India. "Over the piano keyboard I started to draw sine waves that showed the keyboard becoming a wave. And then it just made sense. By striking the wave, you could play it discretely, like a percussive instrument. By moving over the waves, and gliding, it can become a continuous sound. And once I had that I could hear the music."

It took nearly 50 prototypes of the Seaboard, and 58 versions of its software and notation system, which looks more like a data visualisation than traditional music notation, to arrive at the production-ready Seaboard. It was demonstrated in public for the first time at SXSW in March.


Eighty-eight of them will be available for preorder on 12 April.

But the Seaboard is only the start for Roli, the Dalston, east London, company that Lamb founded. Its 19 employees hold a hack café every Monday whose spin-off projects include the Seatara, a guitar that lets players sustain notes by bending the instrument rather than using a pedal, and a handheld, modular drum machine.

Lamb sees other applications of the Sea interface, ranging from cheap, flexible prosthetics to computer peripherals. "With typing, the data being sent from our brains to the computer is like a really small cable. We want to increase that bandwidth, starting with music, but moving to more general technological projects."