The Space Between
Will.i.am with the Seaboard Rise 2 developed by Roli.
Musical instruments tend to have either very short or very long lifespans. The likes of the calliope and the octobass were forgotten long after inception. Those that pass the test of time come to exert a huge influence on how we understand music. The violin was born in 16th-century Italy, the modern piano around the close of the 18th century, and the electric guitar in the 1930s. In the years since, even as digital technology has expanded the ways in which we can generate sound, the core repertoire of instruments has remained the same.
The Seaboard hopes to gain a seat at this table. Designed by the London-based company Roli, it is a keyboard-shaped MIDI controller with a flexible silicone surface. While keyboards have a single input through the strike of a key, the Seaboard is sensitive to five different types of movement, such as the way the finger glides between the keys or the speed at which the finger lifts. It frees musicians from the twelve-tone system, allowing players to instead slide between them. In the words of Roli’s founder Roland Lamb, it allows performers to play “individual notes, but also explore the spaces between them” – a vast ocean of sound.
Lamb first developed the Seaboard as a student at the Royal College of Art, before establishing Roli in 2009. The piano-sized Seaboard Grand was released in 2013, followed in 2015 by the lighter, more portable Seaboard Rise, and then in 2016 by Blocks, a modular music creation system with a minimised Seaboard attachment. They proved popular with professional musicians, composers and producers. After that, Roli explored other products, including Lumi, a polychromatic keyboard-teaching service.
Now, after a tumultuous period that included a restructuring, Lamb and his team have returned to their origins. The Seaboard Rise 2 is a “refined and reengineered” sequel to the Rise, with significant advances in software. Its interface has been improved to enable ease of play, with wider keys and embossed precision frets to help players sense the exact position of their fingers. For the first time, you can play the Seaboard with your eyes closed.
Disegno caught up with Lamb to discuss the Rise 2’s ridged design, the challenges of improving a musical device and whether or not it qualifies as a new instrument.
Disegno When did you begin working on this second iteration of Seaboard? Was it planned as a definitive new Seaboard, as opposed to the small, iterative improvements to the original?
Roland Lamb In some ways, we've already been through many generations and iterations of Seaboard. The Seaboard is really two different things. It refers to an overall interface and an instrument. A Seaboard could be part of a piano, or a keyboard, or a variant of a Rhodes piano – that is, the interface of all of those instruments. Before we launched anything, we went through about five different generations of development of completely different structures for how to build it, and how to make the interface and the sensors work. Within those five generations, each one had dozens, if not hundreds, of mini-iterations. Rise 2 is the first [iteration] where we have fundamentally evolved the playing experience of the Seaboard. In the first iterations, we were basically just changing the shape of the keys. The Grands were very rounded, and then the Rise had a little bit more articulation, and then the Seaboard Blocks had even more. I was thinking about it – this is a little bit philosophical – in terms of the relationship between waves and particles. A piano is kind of a percussive instrument. It has taken all of the different possible tones that you can have in music, and it's made them into 12 parts. In doing so, it basically defined all modern music as built around the piano keyboard and the twelve-tone scale. Before, everything else was different. And now everything is tuned to the piano; it defines the structure of music as we know it. Those are like particles of a spectrum of sound waves basically, and a set of relationships that emerge from those. With the Seaboard, we had to think about the wave form. How do you access all the different elements and possible pitches that you can on a violin? A lot of the expression of music comes from that, and it comes from the human voice, in the subtle variations in timbre, tone and pitch. Like when I'm speaking to you, the fact that I say “pitch” at a slightly higher pitch, that's part of how you will understand the meaning of what I'm trying to communicate. With the Seaboard, this was an anchoring metaphor. From a design perspective, I took it quite literally: it is a wave, and I'm going to make it like a wave. And I'm going to play on the tops of the crests of the wave. The shape of a sine wave was an inspiration for me for the Seaboard Grand. But waves come in different shapes and sizes and meanings and complexities. And that's another thing we know from music, because the different shapes of soundwaves define timbre, tone and so forth. I realised that I needed to bring something from the physical experience of another family of instruments, which is guitars and stringed instruments. The Rise 2 contains these little frets on the keys. It's just a tiny bit of silicon, but it's like a guitar string – you can feel where you are. They’re a tactile reference point. With them, you can feel exactly if you’re in tune or not, just like you would on a violin. There is a threshold where you're getting the minimum level of tactile feedback that you need to make micro-corrections. Earlier Seaboards were below that threshold, and now we're above it. It's a very subtle thing, because you don't want to go so much above it that you lose the continuity.
Marco Parisi is a well-known Seaboardist.
Disegno What drove that change? Is this something which has come up from speaking to Seaboard players and seeing how they dealt with it and what they wanted?
Roland Lamb I talk to Seaboardists a lot and I play the Seaboard myself. Probably my own playing of it is more influential. Talking to other people is a good way to understand what the problems are, but it's not a good way to understand what the potential solutions are. The Seaboard is so far out there in terms of what people's experiences have been that they know how to articulate the issues they've been having, but they don't know how to think about what the solution could be. You have to have an ability to think both musically and in terms of interaction design. While I'm playing the seaboard and playing the piano, I’m thinking about what is music and what is gesture and how can gesture be translated into music more easily. I try different things to get really close to the nub. I just don't think it's possible to do so only through the process of listening. Sometimes it’s about listening to the real virtuosos. But the thing about virtuosos is that, generally speaking, music learning relies on some degree of neuroplasticity. Studies have shown that there appear to be dedicated functions within the brain for musical ability that everyone has to some degree. We all have the circuitry to make music, but in some people it's more robust than in others. But all people who learn music show signs of this sort of neuroplastic development. If you're dealing with a virtuoso – like Marco Parisi, for example, who is an incredible Seaboard player – they’ve practised for so long that their minds made all these sorts of adjustments and developments about how they would play. So in some ways, although the virtuosos' feedback is interesting, they're not representative of the wider issue. The wider issue for the Seaboard was that it was too hard to play in tune, because of these deep issues to do with how I judged the balance between a particle in a wave, or a percussion instrument and a melodic instrument. The Seaboard is a little bit of both – that's the power of the Seaboard and the kind of why it's such a dreamy and interesting instrument. You can make the sound of any instrument because it can do both. It can morph like a chameleon into the shape of any sound. But for a lot of people it was too hard to play percussively and too hard to play in tune. There's an interesting Brian Eno quote, where he says something like "go to a faraway place, and then come back from there." In a sense even adding the ridges is coming back from the purity of the Grand as a sine wave, but also realising that we need to make this more playable. It's funny because there was an article on it that said something like, “the world's weirdest instrument just got stranger.” It's kind of true – it is a bit stranger now because it also has this precision feeling, and this almost string-like feeling to it. It's not the last evolution, we'll do more, but Rise 2 is the first time we've taken an existing industrial design and we've only focused on improving it with interactive design and software. And for me it's the first time where, given what an ambitious project this is, the whole experience out of the box is going to be pretty incredible. Everything has matured over many years.
Disegno For someone who's used to playing an older Seaboard, would the presence of those ridges throw them off a little?
Roland Lamb It shouldn't throw off their muscle memory, other than there will be certain kinds of techniques that people may have developed that won't be possible. There might be someone who slides in a certain way, and this ridge will provide too much resistance to it. I think in terms of an adjustment period, it's not long, it's like half an hour to an hour of play. And then it's one of these things where, at least for me, you don't really go back. Once you get used to playing with these with precision frets, when you go back and you play an older Seaboard that doesn't have them it feels like it's unfinished. To me, there's a very powerful experience of progress in playing. Now, this could be different for different players depending on what they do, but so far everyone has given that feedback. [Film composer] A.R Rahman for example, said: "Now I can play with my eyes closed." Which was an issue with the Seaboard.
Disegno It was quite visually demanding?
Roland Lamb Because you couldn't feel where your fingers were. You had to visually have some reference point. Really great players got around it. But for a lot of people, that was an issue. Going back to a discussion about whether the Seaboard is an instrument, if someone were to philosophically come up with a set of tests of what qualifies the line between an instrument and an interface, it might be that one of the tests is that instruments can be played with one's eyes closed, period. That is a test of what you could call a real musical instrument. And it could be that the Seaboard failed that test before the Rise 2. Now we'll pass that test.
Marco Parisi has produced music for Will.i.am.
Disegno I know you're interested in this question of whether it's an instrument, and that you feel it is. Is that purely intellectual curiosity, or would it feel lesser to you if someone saw it as just an interface?
Roland Lamb I'd mostly just be interested to talk with the person about the reasons. At the end of the day, I don't care about the word. What I care about is what will happen in the future. What is the future of how people will make music? I don't believe it's all going to just be AI. I don't think we're just going to all listen to computerised music – there's something about the experience of making music and playing music and jamming with other people. That is, for me, one of the most profound experiences of human life. And something that I think through digital technology can be shared much, much more broadly. That to me really is the question. The thing about musical instruments is, because they change very, very slowly, and there's very few of them, we think of them as static . We think of them almost as being ahistorical. But they're not. Take the piano. There's all kinds of reasons why the piano is designed in the way it is. The reason why the keys are organised is that mediaeval music was based on a very simple scale, and that was to do with the architecture of cathedrals and the fact that you have these sounds resonating, and so you can't have too many. So there's these weird anecdotal and deep reasons why the piano is the way it is, why twelve-tone music is the way it is, and they're historical facts. And digital technology is going to create a new set of historical facts about musical instruments or interfaces. What's at stake for me in saying this is an instrument is really saying that, we know that interfaces are a dime a dozen, anybody can create a new interface: "I've added a knob here and a button there". With instruments, there's only about four different branches in terms of families and then there's very few elements in those. And the interesting thing about this question, "Could the Seaboard become understood as a new musical instrument?" is that it shows that actually, these are not ahistorical categories, they are historical, and we can change them for the better.
Disegno Does the business model behind Roli affect its status as an instrument? Like you say, there have been significant changes to instruments in the past, but you've never had, say, Violin 2, a specific product model. And the fact that you are a specific company that produces Seaboard, which no-one else does. Do you think that model affects it?
Roland Lamb Oh, I do. I think that musical instruments are cultural objects. So the culture that surrounds them and how they're sold and marketed, and by whom, and how they’re named, and all of that is part of the experience. I thought about whether we should just call this Seaboard 2; it's an evolution of the fundamental idea versus an evolution of one of the products. But we decided that the Rise 2 format was excellent. It felt like it would be confusing to move away from those names [Grand and Rise, ed.], because people knew them, and the format is very similar, even if the overall experience has evolved. It's something that you can do as a company — for example, the Fender Rhodes is considered an instrument. The interface is the same as other keyboards, but it's a particular sound, and we know it from all kinds of hits in the 70s and 80s that have the sound of that instrument, and there's a playing style, and there's a particular technique. And so I think you can do it in that format. The ethnomusicologist who looked at this question might say, actually, there's another test for a musical instrument, which is that it has to be larger than any single corporate entity. The interface has to be made by multiple companies in competition. I just find all these questions interesting to think about in terms of understanding what we're doing.
Disegno I suppose the counter would be that it's only been that way in the past, because the nature of the instruments being produced then was such that multiple people could make them. Whereas to do something new now, maybe the technology involved is too advanced or its proprietary. You can't expect new instruments to fit that same model as older ones.
Roland Lamb Yeah. Personally, I don't think that it would knock it out. Let's imagine that Tesla is the first to market with self-driving cars that really work and can be used on a mass scale. People wouldn't be like “That's not really a self-driving car, because it's only made by one company.” The car drives by itself, so it's a self driving car! I like that if it looks like a musical instrument, it sounds like a musical instrument, you play it like a musical instrument, it is a musical instrument.
Words Joe Lloyd
Interview Oli Stratford
Images Roli