ROLI Unveils Airwave, An Expressive New Way Of Learning And Creating Using Its MPE instruments
ROLI Airwave Gestural Controller – Innovation or D-Beam on Steroids
ROLI is positioning the Airwave for both beginners and experienced musicians alike. Airwave harnesses five dimensions: sound, sight, touch, vision and voice.
Furthering its innovative – and education-leaning – remit, ROLI today has announced Airwave, which it describes as a “breakthrough in musical interaction for both music learners and creators.”
On first glance, musicians may see the Airwave as a Roland D-Beam on steroids. More advanced gestural controller options have been available for years, like the Leap Motion + GECO combination or the Genki Instruments Wave MIDI Controller. But the Airwave goes beyond most earlier gestural controllers, letting you use a variety of gestures to add different types of musical expression.
This new hardware frame smartly re-configures any ROLI keyboard (such as its Seaboard, LUMI Keys or Piano M) into an ‘intelligent piano’, harnessing vision and voice capabilities to make music learning ultra easy, and granting an even wider range of dimensions to explore for its MPE-savvy audience.
“Music learning and playing have been far too difficult for too long: intimidating, expensive, and one-size-fits-all,” states ROLI’s CEO, Roland Lamb. “At ROLI, we are on a mission to free the music, making it possible for anyone to learn the language of music with new digital tools that open up new possibilities of human expression.
“With recent advances in computer vision and AI, we are finally able to innovate beyond the keys, and can now bring this human-centric technology to music learners and creators alike.”
So, what exactly is Airwave? Airwave is designed specifically for ROLI keyboard controllers. Ostensibly an aluminium stand for your keyboard, the small frame incorporates IR 170 3D infrared cameras and brand new ROLI Vision technology to map the hands of the player. It tracks each of the 27 joints in the hand, noting the subtle finger movements as they play in real-time.
It takes this data and can build personalised and responsive feedback which ROLI says “invites musicians to play in new, more intuitive ways across many more dimensions.” Integration with the ROLI Piano M ($249, €229, £219) and ROLI Learn app ($99.99, €99.99, £79.99 annually) really opens up Airwave as an educational tool.
Fuelling Airwave is ROLI’s Musical Intelligence (MI) platform, which uses the principles of sound, sight and touch as its central pillars – with Airwave adding vision and voice. Future ‘intelligent’ products are set to follow.
On that ‘voice’ front, ROLI’s Piano AI technology draws on large language models to complement its hand-tracking capabilities, responding organically to natural voice commands – and providing a more human form of communication.
As ROLI states: “Ask your ROLI Piano to show you a chord, a full piece of music, or give you some time to level up your playing.”
Airwave looks to be both a unique and potentially game-changing music-learning tool, particularly when coupled with the ROLI Piano M’s light-up keys and instructional learning angle. Alternatively, for experienced musicians, ROLI Airwave offers new options for musical expression. Creative musicians can use work with the expanded dimensions of control to concoct and explore new sonic frontiers: “With the simple raise of their hands, creators can transform a piano into a full orchestra, just as a conductor would,” states ROLI. “Or, morph mellow synth pads into searing leads with a tilt of the wrist.”
Acclaim for Airwave has come from some notable names, particularly Fred Again producer Marco Parisi, who states that, “Airwave is a game-changer for creating music and in the way we perform. Every movement and gesture creates a new sound unique to them, which will make music much more expressive, and could even lead to new genres of music.”
Spatial Expression with ROLI Airwave:
The ROLI Airwave is available to pre-order for $299, €299 and £249 with shipping expected for April 2025.
Can the ROLI Airwave take gestural music control to a new level? Check out the demo videos and share your thoughts in the comments!
