This has been on my radar for a while.
It doesn’t track fingers, or angle. It’s really just an array of overlapping distance sensors, with a row of LEDs for visual feedback.
(That feedback is about defining zones in XY space above the sensors.)
The rest of it’s interface is about configuring control presets, and switching between them at the press of a button.
I honestly like this approach, but…
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their demos aren’t terribly musical
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there’s no resting your hands on a keyboard between gestures, so arm fatigue is a thing.
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Scrolling their Instagram feed is extra cringy, because they keep repeating the same clickbait headlines on video after video. (“I can’t believe I’m the first person to ever use this!”)
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It makes nonsense claims of being the most expressive controller ever made
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It offers two degrees of expression per hand, while costing the same as Roli’s more expressive offering.
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Their claims of MPE support probably require a few qualifiers, as well. (you can divide the grid to represent a scale in two dimensions, but playing two notes in the same column is going to be a problem. And playing a third note is going to require a second person)
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They want a cash deposit to receive a notification when their Kickstarter launches
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Their justification for the deposit (that it will help determine how many to build) is a blatant lie (as that insight is the whole point of Kickstarter itself).
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They’re looking at a discounted price of $500, where it feels like the MSRP should be half that.
So… yeah.
Every part of the campaign reads as “scam likely”.
But I do want to play with it.
(I know I can make better demos. I’m sure I can build apps that turn this into a legitimate tool for the masses. And that open loop in my head is pulling violently at my ego. It’s bad.)
I’m basically at “avoid like the plague, but try to pick up a unit after the campaign ends, if they make their deliveries.”
Anyway, I’m a bit jaded, but those are my thoughts. Where are you at with all this?
Exciting times!
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I’m jaded from a different angle, I dont think I need to keep looking for expressive instruments at this stage, I’ve got all I need unless someone comes up with something that is way more compelling than whats out there so far. I was well into exploring gimmicks and wave your hands in their air type half-baked ideas when I was in my 20s and 30s but that fades more with every year, and soon I wont even be in my 40s anymore, time flies.
So with that in mind I dont have anything useful to say about the product itself. As for the team behind it, I wouldnt use the word scam, but I did do a tiny bit of digging so that I could get a feel for the team. Small. Hungry. Very young. Found the twitter for one of the main people behind it, which confirms those things and then adds to the picture by demonstrating a few more aspects of where they are coming from in terms of their psyche…
Lots and lots of attempts at self-motivation. Lots of posts that indicate what sort of motivational stuff from other people works for them, and the use of exercise. Some clues about why certain aspects of their pre-launch have been conducted in this way - an emphasis on particular forms of marketing and the deposit stuff is based on the idea that if you can get people to commit to something at the stage they are first wowed by your marketing, they are more likely to go ahead with backing the project at full launch. Plenty of indicators that some of the approach taken is due to certain wank they are teaching him as part of the business side of his degree, but at least there is an engineering side to his degree too. The ROLI product launch has not gone unnoticed by him. The odds arent stacked in his favour, so I dont blame them for having to overcompensate in certain ways. Though personally I’d have put more attention into building for the longer term and iterating on the product idea rather than trying to launch to the moon on the first attempt and within a narrow, ambitious, excessively driven timeframe. No predictions from me as to whether they are actually on track to gain sufficient momentum to create a solid foundation to do more stuff in future, he throws some big numbers around at times which imply much early success in the campaign but I dont have a means to validate those at all. But also I dont have the sort of personality type thats on display here, and thats a big chunk of the reason I’ve never tried to be involved with this sort of endevour at all, it may as well be a parallel universe to my own and of course that strongly influences my commentary. Versions of this type of person sometimes succeed big time when they get a bit older, but I’d rarely bet on them hitting a home run on their first attempt and at this early stage of their personal development. High risk, the chance of giddy highs and crushing lows that could see things flourish or fall apart fairly quickly. How they will cope with major setbacks unclear at this point.
https://x.com/MrIJack_
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As for the price, since Im not interested in owning the product I dont have a well rounded opinion of what the right price would be from a customers perspective.
But certainly from the successful product delivery and sustainable business side of things, I actually prefer to see that sort of price rather than a much lower one. It shifts the most likely point of failure away from the manufacturing and delivery phase and onto the earlier phase instead (of possibly killing demand too much to achieve intitial sales targets). And Im guessing they dont have other things stacked in their favour that would allow them to price it based more on what a customer might ideally want to pay than what it really costs to make without sacrificing healthy margins - ie they arent in a highly favourable country for achieving extremely competitive pricing (regardless of which other country the actual mass manufacturing is done in), and they probably arent backed by a huge pool of external investment or government subsidy. There are reasons we havent seem that many products come out of Australia, and why the most obvious recent example of Australian electronic instruments (Melbourne Instruments Nina and Delia) are not priced at the bargain end of the market.
That said, just because they havent gone in at a stupidly low/artifical price, doesnt mean the chances of failure during the product delivery phase drop to very low risk indeed, there are still plenty of other mistakes or lack of good fortune that can mess up that stage too, no matter how much you try to come up with a sensible price. But at least they arent starting from a position that looks, from an outsiders perspective, rather shaky on that front before they’ve even got into that phase fully.
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Audima Labs is a little late to the party:
I will add the Sway as an entry to my list of MPE hardware controllers tonight.
MIDI Blaster seems like a very adept one-handed controller, probably more in line with Touché than Sway.
(Sway seems more akin to a theremin, but with smarter control mappings.)
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They both use spatial technology for MIDI input, so that is how I organize them on my list of MPE hardware controllers. The other entries sharing that trait are the Artiphon Orba (2) and the Tirare:
These other two products are not as closely related compared to the MIDI BLASTER, which is why I did not originally mention them in my prior post. If you want a non-MPE comparison, there is the airpiano by Omer Yosha:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180512133454/http://www.airpiano.de/
Orba doesn’t use spatial technology so much as… gravity? (It’s got an accelerometer or a gyroscope in there, measuring which way is down.)
Like, it knows in general terms how fast it’s moving, but it does not have a positional reference of any kind.
Anyway, I don’t think any of these are similar enough for a “late to the party” call.
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Sure, I have to deal with categorizing every single MPE hardware controller along with MPE hardware synthesizers, among other products, so this is the solution I came up with. If you have a better suggestion, let me know and I will consider your argument(s).
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Hey, Jeremy from Audima Labs here! 
I just wanted to clarify a point you raised:
“It offers two degrees of expression per hand, while costing the same as Roli’s more expressive offering.”
While it’s true that The Sway’s playable space tracks movement in two dimensions (x and y), it’s actually much more than just motion tracking. The Sway recognizes six distinct hand gestures within that space, each of which can be mapped to control different MIDI parameters with ease.
Heres a video showing off these different gestures - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ad6kGrtqas
I am disappointed to hear that our campaign came across that way, but I appreciate the honest feedback. I’ll take it as a chance to improve and ensure we’re even clearer and more transparent moving forward. Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with us.
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