“With Lumi, I was hitting a wall,” 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 direct approach that puts the player’s hands directly into the lesson itself.
Mastering artificial intelligence
Of course, it wouldn’t be a gadget announced in 2024 if it didn’t include an artificial intelligence stack. In addition to Airwave’s AI-enabled computer vision, the Roli Learn platform is being updated with Open AI’s ChatGPT chatbot. This will enable piano students to operate their voice to control their playing, interact with the lessons and ask questions. Press a button on the keyboard and you can give 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 which notes belong to the C minor chord and the app will show you on the screen. You can also ask more advanced questions, such as “What is the Lydian scale?” or “Qho wrote “Hotel California”?” The accuracy you get may vary, as the responses will be about as good as you can currently expect from chatbots.
It’s certainly not better than having a real music teacher by your side to answer your questions, but it’s probably faster than finding the right YouTube video to teach you how to figure something out by playing on your own.
“If you think about it, people have been practicing the piano for about 250 years,” Lamb says. “Hundreds of millions of people log in for thousands of hours. And it’s fundamentally an inefficient thing.”
A good teacher can go beyond answering questions and show you how to play a piece correctly or monitor the position of your hands and body. But music lessons can be costly, and teachers’ and students’ schedules aren’t always in sync. Lamb wants Airwave to fill the gaps between formal classes, where a student wants to learn on their own time and doesn’t mind being helped by a snazzy AI gadget.
“The instrument itself is not intelligent,” Lamb says. “The instrument doesn’t know what you’re doing and can’t give you that feedback. And if we can make it much more efficient in terms of this fundamental ability, people will learn faster and they will learn more.”
Car filters
In addition to Airwave’s capabilities as a teaching tool, Roli also positions the device as an instrument that more advanced users can operate in the music production process.
I sat in the room with Lamb as he gave a demonstration of Airwave’s other capabilities. His hands fluttered over the keyboard in a manner very similar to someone playing the Theremin, an ethereal instrument played by manipulating unseen electromagnetic fields around a pair of antennas. Airwave works similarly. Because infrared cameras track every finger movement, different hand positions can be used to change pitch, filter frequencies, or manipulate oscillators and other effects. Roli claims that Airwave can track movements such as lifting, sliding and tilting the hand and fingers to control various parameters selected by the user. The company says additional movements – and even more subtle tracking – will be supported later.