Back in 2022, I sat down with my good colleague, Cagri Erdem, to explore two commercially available new interfaces for musical expression: the Seaboard Grand and the ContinuuMini. I have written about my experiences with both of these devices in my book, Sound Actions: Conceptualizing Musical Instruments. In short, they are both super exciting to play with, particularly because unlike many other electronic instruments, they allow for continuous control of pitch and timbre. This is what Cagri and I wanted to explore in a duo setting.
The recordings have been sitting on my hard drive ever since, but I finally got the time to make some quick edits of interesting parts of the hour-long improvisation:
About the instruments
If you haven’t seen these instruments before, I can tell that the Seaboard Grand is a keyboard-style controller developed by ROLI. Unlike traditional keyboards, it features a soft, continuous silicone surface that allows for expressive control over pitch, timbre, and dynamics. This enables the user to slide between notes, apply vibrato, and modulate sounds directly through touch. As a pianist, I immediately feel at home with this device, but I also have to be careful not to play it as a piano, it is difficult to handle so many degrees of freedom at once (read more about that in my book).
The ContinuuMini, on the other hand, is a compact expressive synthesizer developed by Haken Audio. It features a touch-sensitive ribbon-like playing surface that also allows for continuous control of pitch, timbre, and dynamics. The synthesizer and touch of the ContinuuMini is similar to the larger Continuum from Haken, but it is much smaller. In practice, you end up playing it with one or two fingers at a time.
Even though both instruments feature a continuous control surface and have built-in synthesizers they are quite different to play. You quickly realize that they have different sonic and musical affordances, to borrow a term from Gibsonian psychology Norman’s design philosophy. This calls for a very different playing style and musical results.
Ambient sound mix
Cagri and I recorded the improvisation in the stairway corridor of the beautiful ZEB building in the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo. One of the ideas for choosing this location was to explore how the ambiance of the location would influence both our performance and the final video. This connects to ongoing research in the AMBIENT project where we explore how environmental rhythms influence people’s bodily behaviour.
When making the mixes, I decided to render out two additional versions to the one embedded above: one with only the clean instrument sound, and one with only the ambient sound. This sound very differently, of course, and the aim is to prove the point of how the ambient sounds contribute to the whole. The plan is to analyze this in more detail later on, but for now, here you can check out the two alternative mixes: