Roli has announced its latest piece of kit, the Airwave, which uses onboard infrared cameras and “Music Intelligence” to translate the natural gestures of a musician into control and manipulation of sounds and parameters.
Designed to work exclusively with other instruments in the Roli family, including the Seaboard and Piano M, it also comes with a beta version of its Airwave Player plugin which is compatible with most DAWs, and contains a library of inspiring sounds and 3D visuals which react to your movements.
Built-in gestures include:
- Air Raise: Raising your hands is the perfect way to add intensity and excitement to a sound
- Air Tilt: Like twisting a knob, but in the air; Air Tilt gives you fine control of filter frequencies, LFOs, effect mixes, and more.
- Air Glide: Moving your hands horizontally across the keys is the perfect way to tweak your sounds further – modifying new layers you introduced with Air Raise, for example.
- Air Slide: Like the Slide gesture on Seaboard, moving your hands from front to back over the keys is a great way to add texture, depth, or extra layers to a sound.
- Air Flex: refers to the angle of your wrist, from straight ahead to pointed downwards. It’s a great way to add additional expression to larger movements – like Air Raise or Air Glide.
The system, called ROLI Vision, uses what looks like a pair of infrared cameras which scan the hands at 90 frames per second, tracking all 27 joints in each hand, for incredibly precise control of music expression.
The proof will be in how accurate and reproducible the effects are. Will the unit always be able to distinguish between the five gesture types and how they interact with one another? Particularly for live performance, musicians won’t want the unit to do something different every time what appears to be the same gesture is used.
Music Intelligence, which we presume is just a brand name for AI, is said to be a ‘technological breakthrough’ and is based on the five ‘keys’: sound, sight, touch, vision and voice. Future ROLI instruments will build on this system.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, units are like gold dust at present, with the company currently taking pre-orders for the fourth batch of units, shipping in April 2025.
Tue Airwave alone retails for $299, while a bundle also including the Piano M comes in at $499, a bundle with Seaboard M at $599, and a bundle with Seaboard 2 at $1,489.
Specifications
- Expressive controller
- ROLI Vision Hand-tracking Camera
- 3.5mm TRS Headphone Output
- 3.5mm TRS Pedal input (incl. 6.3mm dongle)
- 2 x USB-C ports (data and power)
- Magnetic USB port for use with compatible ROLI Hardware
- Class-compliant MIDI over USB
- Class-compliant audio interface
- 65W USB-C PD power supply
- 221mm x 122mm x 369mm / 812g
Currently the ROLI music creation software is macOS only on Apple Silicon processors. ROLI products in general tend to be compatible with OSs and DAWs from the past 6-8 years.
ROLI Airwave can be used with:
- ROLI Seaboard 2 (fka Seaboard RISE 2)
- Up to 2 ROLI Seaboard M (fka Seaboard Block M)
- Up to 2 ROLI Piano M (fka LUMI Keys Studio Edition)
Airwave will also work with older generations of Seaboard, excluding Seaboard Grand.
