New instrument scales musical heights

I have a funny story surrounding the Eigenharp.

A few nights ago I was having last minute doubts about the original name we had picked for our startup. At a certain point, while brainstorming new names with a Dutch/Vietnamese friend, I came up with Eigenlabs. A quick search on Google led me to a site where weird instruments were being sold. "Argh, it's already taken, oh well". Fast forward two days, and I find the article I submitted here, on Reddit. "Hmmm, these instruments look familiar...". A quick Google search confirms that the company producing them is... Eigenlabs. What are the odds? :) baader_meinhof_count += 1.

I wish they'd have played a different song. While the instrument looks impressive, playing a generic sounding piece of rock means I can't help but wonder if three people couldn't have played the same piece with older instruments.

So it's a midi guitar with a breath controller and built in synth/drum machine?

Hardly a "new instrument."

A new interface != a new instrument. Typically, a new sound is the necessary condition for that label.

As someone who works with music on a daily basis, I would welcome with open arms a truly new instrument - but trends in popular music suggest we may not see one in our lifetimes.

What this is and what's exciting about it is that it's a new human-computer-inteface designed solely for producing synthesized music.

Think about what we had before: Midi keyboards, Midi guitars, keyboards and mice, a few more interesting control surfaces and not much else.

Sure the keyboards and guitars would be good for producing keyboard and guitar sounds, but what we needed was a way to control the gamut of sounds that can be produced by a computer in a unified way. This could well be it...

Agreed, their demo was poor, but Les Paul was no Jimi Hendrix either.

I would be interested to see what sort of software comes with it and how reprogrammable it is.