wax&wires

The Vivace Touchscreen Music Computer

Picture an ultra-widescreen laptop with an iPhone-like multitouch interface in lieu of a keyboard. Now imagine that it’s dedicated to music making apps. That’s essentially what Young-Shin Lee and Hai-Jin Jung have created in the Vivace.

Music aficionados rejoice. The idea of having only 1 device that combines multiple instruments, track recording, equalizer, sound editing, internet connectivity, and a touchscreen interface all into one compact package is drool worthy. The Vivace makes it all possible. Information is scarce on how the interface works but I have no doubt up-and-coming artists like FrankMusik and Bjork could do a lot with such a device.

The first thing I thought of when I saw it was actually Apple’s patent filing on a similar concept from a few years back, where the user could hot swap various interfaces like joysticks, piano keys, or a mixer in place of their MacBook keyboards.

I’ve played with all sorts of keyboard and music apps on the iPhone, and I’m not sure that I want something that’s not a physical interface. I could see a hybrid working okay, or even a multi-touch mixer being usable. The tough part with trying to mimic a piano, or other instruments that require expresivity, is that your fingers need to feel a piano to treat it like a piano. You could defnitely develop new types of instruments on it, but trying to mime out piano lines on a glass screen won’t ever be as fun as nailing them on a 9′ grand.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 at 5:03 pm. It is filed under wires and tagged with computers, interface, multitouch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.