The world’s best music technology innovators gathered at the SXSW Music Accelerator in Austin, Texas to unveil their most ambitious new products last night, and ROLI was among them.

Roland Lamb, CEO of ROLI, gave two presentations to a panel of prestigious judges, talking about the Seaboard, as well as ROLI’s ambitions as a company. The judges evidently liked what they heard, as at 6pm local time ROLI was announced as the winner.

Upon awarding ROLI with first place in the SXSW Music Accelerator, Evan Lowenstein, Accelerator emcee and judge, said, “The Seaboard is clearly the brainchild of a passionate visionary who found a way to capitalize on digital technology to open up a whole new world of possibility for musicians.”

Roland commented, “We’re thrilled to have won the SXSW Music Accelerator. ROLI is building new bridges between music and technology, and since SXSW brings together these two worlds in a unique way, gaining this recognition here is a tremendous validation of the remarkable work of the whole ROLI team developing the Seaboard.”

Down a back alley in Hackney, east London, I glimpsed the future.

- John Moore, the Guardian

The familiar black-and-white interface of the piano keyboard has existed for several centuries without any massive changes, but the designers at ROLI have just pushed it forward with the introduction of the Seaboard Grand.

- The Verge

The execution of this device was simply genius

- Unique Squared

Upon playing the Seaboard (or hearing it), one is immediately aware of its superiority

- Port Magazine

If good music is the food of life, then a wonderful instrument like The Seaboard is the kitchen for cooking it.

- Tech My Money

Click the links below for further articles:

Mashable
Gizmodo
Technabob
Geekologie
Diskidee
Gizmag
Classic FM
KeyboardMag

Music and technology mega-festival SXSW promises to be a very busy and exciting time for us. Not only will we be showing off the Seaboard at the Pandora Discover Den and the Gear Expo, we will also be participating in the Music Accelerator on Wednesday 13 March, and to top it all we are holding a launch event where Jordan Rudess of Dream Theater will perform on the Seaboard on Thursday 14 March.

Preparations for the event have been going well, as a large cohort of the ROLI team readies itself to relocate to Austen, TX for a week. If you’re going to be there too, why not let us know?

Now this is one cool new product.

- Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC Technology Correspondent

Watch the BBC Technology feature on the Seaboard

The Seaboard may be in that rare class of inventions – an invention that offers the potential for doing something in a completely new way.

- BBC World Service

We’re very excited by this new instrument and hope to get our hands on one soon.

- Music Tech

We recently got to test out a prototype, which we found to offer a genuinely different playing experience… The benefits of the highly sensitive interface are obvious.

- Music Radar

Click the links below for further articles:

Sound on Sound
Audio Fanzine
Sonic State
Synthtopia
Gear Junkies
Hispasonic
Cuonet
Matrix Synth

We are proud to introduce the Seaboard GRAND, a radically new kind of musical instrument and digital controller that reimagines the most iconic of musical instruments – the piano.

An evolution of the piano keyboard, the Seaboard has a soft three-dimensional surface that enables unprecedented real-time, intuitive control of the fundamental characteristics of sound: pitch, volume, and timbre. Piano and keyboard players can instantly transfer their skills to the Seaboard and begin exploring its new capacities.

The Seaboard is the first electronic instrument to enable control of a wide variety of parameters through traditional techniques for expressiveness and virtuosity. As a controller, the Seaboard allows players to manipulate sound like never before. It authentically simulates a plethora of other instruments – guitar note bends, subtle string and horn swells, and much more are expressively created in seconds instead of hours. Both as an instrument and as a controller the Seaboard creates a world of entirely new sonic possibilities, and provides a new bridge between acoustic and electronic approaches to music.

A limited edition of 88 Seaboard GRANDs will be available for pre-order worldwide starting in April 2013. Each Seaboard GRAND will be hand-assembled to order in the ROLI studio in the heart of Dalston, East London, and, in recognition of its provenance, each will be named after a particular note on the piano keyboard, from A0 to C8.