At the 2018 NAMM Show, Enhancia is introducing Oria – a ‘connected ring’, designed to add expressive control to your keyboard playing.
Here’s what they have to say about the Oria:
The connected ring is capable of controlling musical effects through predefined movements of the hand. Thus, while using a keyboard, the musician can freely add different variations to the notes played by a simple movement of the hand.
For instance, keyboardist can add a vibrato by wavering the hand.
Thanks to nine integrated sensors and real-time gesture recognition algorithm, a motion library especially designed to complement keyboards was developed.
The ring comes with a hub which could be connected to a computer or directly to a keyboard. The signal recorded by the sensors is sent to the hub through a proprietary wireless protocol optimized for low latency. The overall system is a patented technology.
Here’s an example of a performance, using the Oria to add expression:
Enhancia plans to fund production of the Oria through a Kickstarter campaign in March 2018, with delivery planned for late 2018. See the company’s site for details.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha haha
A real musician doesn’t need this.
Seems tricky how it would discern from movements you don’t want to be interpreted as pitch mod and those you do.
The demo sounds ok, but it’s just hard to imagine how you could get it to only work when you need to and shut up the rest of the time.
I kind of like the rolling pin one better. But this sure has a small fingerprint.
I like the concept, and works with any existing keyboard, the real question is how good the gesture recognition AI is. For example does it correctly distinguish between my hand jumping to play another note vs vibrato?
lol, I have been playing the most expressive keyboard since I was five, it’s called the piano.
Yes, the piano is incredibly expressive. 88-note polyphony, and velocity is assigned to volume and timbre. A CC64 pedal, a CC66 pedal, an layer-switch pedal (for una corda samples). But it has no realtime control. Velocity only. You can choose how hard to play the note and when to let it go.
That said, I’ve had way more expressive experiences on a piano than any synth. BUT, I have had very expressive experiences with synths with BC.
This is actually an interesting piece of gear!
Don’t know if this will be the road to go. Yamaha did have a project called ‘stretchable strain sensor project’ which incorporated VR gloves for musicians: http://www.y2lab.com/project/stretchable_strain_sensor/ and/or http://www.smart2zero.com/news/yamaha-prototypes-vr-gloves-musicians A Dutch company delivers VR gloves with open fingertips: https://manus-vr.com
VR gloves are coming to musicians it seems.
I love this!