05-04-2016

Making Music with ROLI

by Ryan McIntyre

NOISE, RISE Today we are excited to announce that Foundry has lead a $27 million financing round in ROLI. Based in London, ROLI makes connected hardware and software products that transform music-making with a platform that bridges the gap between acoustic and electronic instruments and allows anyone to make music.

ROLI’s Seaboard is a new kind of musical instrument, an evolution of the familiar electronic keyboard that lets players shape sound through five dimensions of touch on a soft and smooth touch and pressure responsive surface. This brings unprecedented expressivity to the instrument, enabling incredibly realistic expressions of acoustic instruments while bringing new possibilities to fully synthetic sounds as well.

ROLI sits squarely in our human-computer interaction theme. We believe ROLI’s products represent a new kind of connected music-making platform, and we’re even more excited about ROLI’s product roadmap going forward. We’re excited to be joining ROLI’s growing team of polymath engineers, artists, designers, and musicians as they build the future of connected music.

Visit ROLI.com and pick up an award-winning Seaboard RISE, or download the amazing (and free) 3D-touch enabled NOISE iOS app to get a taste of ROLI via your iPhone or iPad.

Finally, check out this amazing video of ROLI’s own Marco Parisi playing Hendrix’s classic Little Wing. Close your eyes and you’ll have no idea it isn’t a guitar playing that solo!