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This isn’t a washboard, it’s a digital piano that can bend pitch (and your mind)

Even the brilliant mind of Beethoven never could’ve imagined the Seaboard Grand. This futuristic-looking electronic keyboard replaces the piano or keyboard’s traditional keys with continuous-touch “keywaves” that let musicians select an infinite number of absolute pitches and manipulate them in a dizzying number of ways. Design company Roli created the Grand, which has been explained as a ‘fretless piano.’

“Sound on a piano is very pixelated, in separate discrete elements, and if you tie all those together it can feel continuous,” said creator Roland Lamb to Wired. “But other instruments, like a violin, are high resolution, because the sound is continuous and changing.”

Seaboard GRAND Overview

The Grand, which uses a soft-touch, pressure-sensitive interface, is played like a piano. Because of its infinite pitches, the instrument has the ability to vibrate, bend and modulate tones just by using the keys themselves. Move your finger left on a key? It’ll ‘bend’ downwards.  Move it right? The pitch will rise. The Seaboard also has the ability to sound like other instruments.

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At the core of the Seaboard Grand is the company’s proprietary sensor platform called the Sea Interface. 40 engineers from Lamb’s company, Roli, have constructed this platform, a process which has been particularly difficult because the sensors lay on an undulating — instead of flat — surface. As a result, it’s certainly not cheap. Three different versions are available, the 37-keywave Seaboard Grand Studio is $2,000, the 61-keywave Grand Stage, $3,000, and the brand-new 88-keywave Grand Limited First Edition will cost you a whopping $8,888 (nothing arbitrary about that price), though all still fall well short of what it would take to purchase even a used Steinway Grand piano.

Yet, legendary Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer (and Jamie Cullum, who shot a promotional video, above, for it) believe the Grand will unleash musicians’ creativity in fresh new ways. “It behaves much more the way you imagine as a human being you would want to interact with your notes,” said Zimmer to CNN. “It doesn’t have that stiff ‘plunky’ thing that a piano has. It automatically has a sort of sensuality to it… Look, if Debussy or Ravel had had one of these I think their music would have been X-rated.”

Chris Leo Palermino
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Chris Leo Palermino is a music, tech, business, and culture journalist based between New York and Boston. He also contributes…
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