From his piano, Roland Lamb used to be jealous of saxophonists and guitar players; how they could bend and manipulate the notes in a way that he could not.
Instead of the note ending after he struck the key, he wanted to shape and slide the sound from the piano just as a guitarist could bend notes.
Such a frustration has led, after four years in development, to a futuristic recreation of the piano – a sleek black keyboard instrument which allows the keys to blend into each other and lets sounds be tweaked, manipulated and elongated.
Underneath the silicone rubber keyboard of the Seaboard, launched by Lamb’s company Roli, squats an array of sensors that react to the touch of a finger pressing down, changing the pitch and volume of the sound according to the touch. The technology could soon find its way into games consoles, cars and even robotics devices.
“As a keyboard player it felt like I should be able to play and use the same keyboard finger as I am using to activate the note to vary it,” says Lamb.
Without any knowledge of sensor engineering or material science, the philosophy graduate took apart pianos and keyboards during a masters degree at the Royal College of Art in London to try and make sense of his idea.
“I wanted a solution that was both intuitive – based on years of practising the piano – and very tactile so I started playing with these wave-like surfaces … and realising you could get something that was both tactile and intuitive. It is intuitive because it has exactly the same layout as a piano so you can use the same scales to play it and it is tactile because you can feel right where you are on those waves.”
After spending £700 of his £1,000 life savings on paying an engineer for the early prototype, Lamb realised he would not be able to buy in talent so he gleaned enough knowledge of the various fields – starting with basic coding books – to develop his idea in the spare room of his flat.
What resulted was the Seaboard – an instrument which allows the musician to bend and slide between notes via the bumps and grooves while also moving along the edges for more elaborate sounds and controlling the volume by pressure. Lamb was trying to emulate his favourite childhood jazz pianist Thelonious Monk who was said to be trying to play “between the keys”.
Like other synthesisers, an array of sounds can be channelled through the Seaboard – from wind instruments to elaborate dance beats and, of course, the traditional piano. If someone is able to play the piano, they will also be able to play the Seaboard, says Lamb.
“Under the silicone is an array of pressure sensors. The force is diffused through the silicone on to this pressure pad and then we read those for signatures and translate them into musical notes and data. Then we are able to filter them in different ways according to the sounds that are used and filter them into the sound engines in the right ways,” he says.
The Seaboard was unveiled in 2013 at the South by South West festival in Austin, Texas, gaining recognition for an innovation in music – a field not known for a stream of new products.
It won plaudits too from musicians. John Moore, a former member of the Jesus and Mary Chain band, said that “in the right hands, it could help to create something really marvellous”. The jazz-pop singer and songwriter Jamie Cullum describes a “sensory experience I am not used to when I play”.
After a year of the Seaboard being on sale – there are three version, ranging between £1,200 and £5,600 – production cannot keep up with demand, and a waiting list of between three and four months for the machines which are handmade in London. Now with 60 staff, Roli raised £10.6m earlier this year in funding, bringing to more than £12.7m the total amount invested so far.
The hefty price tag has attracted critics but Lamb says that they have plans to reduce it in future so that the new device can be thought of in a similar vein as a keyboard, albeit remaining distinct.
The Seaboard is a more organic way of playing, says Lamb, it is like you are touching the sound. “There is a more organic connection between your hands and the sound.”
While Lamb set out to change the piano, in creating the technology that forms the keyboard – called SEA Interactive – he has happened upon a way to interact with machines which could stretch far beyond music into sectors such as gaming and robotics. Staff at Roli are looking at ways to use the sensor technology in areas where precise control is important.
“The technology that we have built to create the Seaboard can be used to shape other things,” he says. When he played computer games in the past, there was little to relate the figure on the screen jumping around to the single click on the joystick. With the Roli technology, there is the opportunity to use “more intelligent gestures”, he says.
“In this next phase of technology development, interface is hugely important because computers are so fast and so advanced, our brains are so fast and advanced, and yet so many of the ways we touch and control technology are tremendously antiquated.”
With parents who were “kind of hippies”, Roland Lamb never had a TV at home but instead found his main form of entertainment in the piano. From New Hampshire, on the US east coast, he moved to Japan to practice Zen buddhism at 18, travelling around Asia and exploring his interest in various types of music. He then went to Harvard, studying classical Chinese and Sanskrit philosophy.
