“I was hitting a wall with Lumi,” Lamb says. “It’s great to learn, but we found that people just weren’t making enough progress.”
Lamb envisions Airwave as a much more immediate approach that takes the player’s hands directly into the lesson itself.
AI Mastery
Of course, this wouldn’t be a device announced in 2024 if it didn’t have a built-in AI stack. Beyond Airwave’s camera AI-enabled computer vision, the Roli Learn platform is being updated with Open AI’s ChatGPT chatbot. This will allow piano students to use their voice to control the experience, interact with lessons, and ask questions. Press a button on the keyboard and you can issue a voice command to load a song to play next or ask questions like what’s the difference between a scale and a chord. You can ask what notes are in a C minor chord and the app will show it to you on the screen. You can also ask more advanced questions like “What is a Lydian scale?” or “Who wrote ‘Hotel California’?” The accuracy you experience may vary, as the responses will be as good as can be expected from chatbots these days.
It’s certainly not better than having a real music teacher by your side to answer your questions, but it’s probably faster than searching for the right YouTube video that will teach you how to figure something out when playing alone.
“If you think about it, people have been practicing piano for about 250 years,” Lamb says. “Hundreds of millions of people logging thousands and thousands of hours. And fundamentally, it is something inefficient.”
A good teacher can go beyond answering questions, showing you how to play a piece correctly or monitoring the position of your hands and body. But music lessons can be expensive, and teacher and student schedules don’t always match. Lamb wants Airwave to fill the gaps between formal classes, where the student wants to learn on their own time and agrees with the help of a fancy artificial intelligence device.
“The instrument itself is not smart,” says Lamb. “The instrument doesn’t know what you’re doing and can’t give you that information. And if we can make it much more efficient in terms of that fundamental capability, then people will learn faster and they will learn more.”
Automatic filter
Beyond Airwave’s capabilities as a tutelage tool, Roli is also positioning the device as an instrument that more advanced users can implement into the music production process.
I sat with Lamb in a room while he demonstrated the Airwave’s other capabilities. His hands hovered over the keyboard in a way that looked very much like someone playing a theremin, the ethereal instrument that juice manipulating the invisible electromagnetic fields around a pair of antennas. The Airwave works in a similar way. Because infrared cameras track every movement of your fingers, different hand positions can be used to change pitch, filter frequencies, or manipulate oscillators and other effects. Roli says Airwave can track movements such as lifting, swiping and tilting hands and fingers to control different parameters chosen by the user. The company says additional movements, and even more subtle tracking, will be supported later.