ROLI Airwave is a new camera hardware that brings an AI piano-learning assistant and spatial expression to any ROLI keyboard.
ROLI, Roland Lamb’s company, has made a name for itself with its revolutionary Seaboards MIDI controllers. Unlike classic keyboards, they offer unique silicon keys that support 5D touch: strike, press, glide, slide, and lift, which opens up new creative ways to play music.
They are not sticking with the 5D Touch. With Airwave, Roli is now introducing add-on hardware that brings spatial expression and more to their keyboard lineup.
ROLI Airwave
Airwave is innovative add-on hardware that you can dock onto any ROLI keyboard. Yes, it is an add-on; sorry, I don’t have a name for it. To me, it looks like an office lamp or oversized futuristic coat hanger. But there is some interesting technology hidden inside.
The ROLI Airwave contains a set of 3D cameras that work closely with two new technologies: the ROLI Vision technology and the ROLI Music Intelligence (MI) platform.
This allows for highly personalized, responsive feedback and also invites musicians to play in new, more intuitive ways across many more dimensions.
5 Keys Of Technology
In combination with the MI technology that utilizes large language models, they bring new capabilities to any ROLI keyboard, including the Seaboards and Piano M (formerly Lumi).
It is powered by five technology keys: sound, sight, touch, and now vision and voice. ROLI says the MI platform will be the foundation of a roadmap of future intelligent products, starting with Airwave.
With Airwave, ROLI focuses on two areas: the music learning area and for creative people.
AI-Supported Music Learning
On the one hand, Roland Lamb and his team want to advance AI music learning.
“Music learning and playing have been far too difficult for too long: intimidating, expensive, and one-size-fits-all,” said Roland Lamb, CEO of ROLI. “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.”
In conjunction with the app, every ROLI keyboard with the Airwave becomes an intelligent piano. In addition to seeing your hands, your piano can now understand and respond to natural voice commands, provide real-time assistance, and engage in more intuitive forms of interaction.
For example, you can ask your ROLI M piano to show you a chord or a full piece of music or give you tips to level up your playing. So it becomes a complete music learning system that can teach good habits across all five principles of technique: posture; hand position; harmony; rhythm, and dynamics.
Spatial Expression
Music creators can unlock spatial expression with Airwave docked on any ROLI Keyboard. For example, if you pair it with your Seaboard and its 5D touch playing, you get five new, additional, intuitive air dimensions to explore: Air Raise, Air Glide, Air Tilt, Air Flex, and Air Slide.
This allows you to control parameters expressively with your hands. For example, you can morph a synth’s cutoff frequency by moving your hand like on a theremin.
With the simple raise of their hands, creators can transform a piano into a full orchestra, just as a conductor would, or morph mellow synth pads into searing leads with a tilt of a wrist.
How extensive and simple the parameter mapping is will have to be seen at a later date.
Roli Airwave First Impression
At first glance, this is an intriguing add-on for ROLI keyboards. It’s exciting that it also brings spatial expression into play for parameter morphing, etc. But I’m not sure whether the market will accept it—for two reasons.
Spatial expression is not a new field. A few years ago, there was the Leap Motion, but it failed on the market. Many years have passed, and technology has advanced. It remains to be seen whether musicians want it more today. The same goes for AI. It is always a risky thing whether we want AI music learning or not.
On the other hand, the design, aka the oversized futuristic coat hangers. Even if it is advertised as opening up music composition, the device is limited to the Roli keyboard world and an area where the cameras are. So, you are tied to one place and cannot move around in your room. It is a cool idea but a somewhat limited application area. But I’m excited to see how it works in real life and how smoothly everything goes.
ROLI Airwave is available for pre-order for $299/£249/299€ and ships early next year. Piano M will retail for $249/€229/£219 and a year of ROLI Learn subscription will be $99.99/€99.99/£79.99.
More information here: ROLI
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