& çâÌæÚUæð´ ·¤è ¥ôÚU Îð¹Ùæ ÁæÚUè ÚU¹ð´ ¥ÍæüÌ ¥ÂÙð ÜÿØ ÂÚU ŠØæÙ ÚU¹ð´Ð ãæÚU Ù ×æÙð´, €UØô´ç·¤ ·¤æ× ·¤ÚUÙð âð ¥æÂ·¤ô ©gðàØ ·¤è Âýæç# ãôÌè ãñ ¥õÚU ÁèßÙ ·¤æ ¹æÜèÂÙ ÎêÚU ãôÌæ ãñÐ ÖÜð ãè ÁèßÙ ×ð´ ç·¤ÌÙè Öè ·¤çÆÙæ§ü €UØô´ Ù ¥æ°, çÁ™ææâæ ¥õÚU ©ˆâæã ÕÙæ° ÚU¹ð´Ð ŠØæÙ ÚU¹ð´, ÜÿØ ã×ðàææ ¥æÂ·Ô¤ Âæâ ãôÌð ãñ´ çÁ‹ãð´ ÂæÙð ·Ô¤ çÜ° ÂýØæâ ¥æÂ ·¤Öè Öè àæéM¤ ·¤ÚU â·¤Ìð ãñ´Ð

Seaboard sings

Wins designs of the year 2014 award

The Telegraph, London
Influential, innovative and inspiring - just three of the "ins" that are obligatory for any product, service or idea to make the cut for the Design Museum's Design of the Year 2014 award. For Miuccia Prada, Zaha Hadid and Konstantin Ceric - three of the contenders for this year's trophy announced this week - such adjectives are like overenthusiastic puppy dogs, following their every' move. So it's refreshing - exciting - to see a relatively unknown company in the mix. Winning the product design category, and with a chance of the overall prize when it is announced on June 30, is a reinvention of that most classical and surely unchangeable of ancient instruments: the piano. And it's all the above plus another: ingenious.
Roland Lamb (a graduate of both Harvard and the radical invention factory that has been the Royal College of Art during the last decade) is the founder and brains behind the Seaboard Grand, a super-slim piano keyboard that can be controlled using hand gestures alone. Reimagining the keys as "soft waves that enable a continuous and discrete real-time, tactile control of sound", the beautifully crafted instrument was launched onto the market last year by ROLL Lamb's now fast-growing music and technology' London-based start-up.
Lamb came up with the idea for the Seaboard in his first year as a Design Products student at the Royal College of Art, while being mentored by Ron Arad. (It makes sense - the ex-tutor has a passion and curiosity for new technology that resonates here). As a jazz pianist himself, Lamb says he had always wanted to be able to make the piano "sing" a little more. Having read about musician Thelonious Monk and the musician's search for the space between the black and white keys, Lamb began to wonder whether that was a question for design. Maybe he could reinvent the piano and actually' make it capable of playing those notes between the keys...
The challenge was set, but as challenges go, it was not insignificant. "1 had the idea but none of the technical skills to create a prototype for a complex product like the Seaboard," he remembers. "I didn't have any resources to build a team at the time, so I had to teach myself a wide range of skills from materials development to software programming." The result would eventually be made possible with patent-pending SEA Interface technology. The optimised tactile materials that give it its continuous wavelike surface, and the sensing solutions which offer a unique kind of passive haptic feedback have been years in development.
As a design object, the Seaboard Grand brings together the best in traditional instrument craft and contemporary' technological design, and measuring just 25.7mm it's also the thinnest. Players can bend and slide notes by rotating their fingers across the bumps and sliding them along the edge of the keyboard. The intensity and volume of each individual note can also be con- trolled by finger pressure.
The Seaboard started with a simple sketch, and was developed and refined through hundreds of iterations. The Limited First Edition model, an investment piece of which ROLI has committed to producing a maximum of 88, has more than 1,000 components. It may be expensive, but this is no straightforward synth. "We continuously got great feedback through trials with an amazing range of artists, and a result were able to really refine the design," says Lamb. One early fan, the film composer Hans Zimmer, gives a gushing testimonial: "It has a sensual touch which feels intuitive and very' human. The Seaboard shows us how to get beyond the boundaries of the keyboard, a technology' that was invented hundreds of years ago. Many people have tried and failed to do this; Roland Lamb and his team are actually' much closer than anyone else has ever come to doing so." The Seaboard won first prize in the 2013 SXSW Music Accelerator in Austin, Texas. On September 23rd 2013, the Seaboard made its debut public performance in front of a 4,000 strong crowd at the Royal Albert Hall.
Of the limited first edition, each will be named after a particular key on the piano and includes a bespoke stand made - like the keyboard - from hand-finished, premium grade milled black aluminium. Of being shortlisted for the award, Lamb says: "It's a huge honour and a wonderful validation of the possibility of creating something new. The key' to realising the Seaboard Grand as a refined product was constant focus, and winning the product category' of the Design of the Year is a reminder of the value of single-minded attention and commitment to one’s ideas." But the Seaboard is the just the beginning. "For me as an inventor and designer and for ROLI as a company. Our goal is to build new interfaces that expand the bandwidth of interaction." Lots more "ins" to translate into wins then. And in the meantime, as someone who hasn't played a piano in years, I still have one hand gesture for ROLI and the Seaboard: fingers crossed.