New instrument scales musical heights | Hacker News Reader

New instrument scales musical heights

news.bbc.co.uk

59 pointsacangiano47 comments

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.

what do you mean with 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. :)

That's odd, I just learned about the Baader-Meinhof pehnomenon the other day, and here it is coming up again. Bizarre.

Where does the name come from? Baader-Meinhof is usually associated with terrorism in Germany...

It's uncertain, but it's likely that whoever came up with the name, had one such episode while learning about the terrorist group.

Oh please. It only looks odd because you can't notice the millions of times it didn't happen.

It's in the same class as confirmation bias, survivor bias, etc.

Of course it only looks odd. There is no magic to it.

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.

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.

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).

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

...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.

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

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.

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

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

Someone else was thinking along the same lines:

http://tweetphoto.com/xgt7ahyp

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

"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.

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

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

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

http://www.eigenlabs.com/

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

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.

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

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.

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

I would stand in line for this.

the real question: will it help a musician mate?

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