Roli Airwave: AI-Powered Piano Teacher and Digital Theremin Revolutionizes Music Learning and Creation

Roli's New Instrument Is Both an AI Piano Teacher and a Digital Theremin

The Roli Airwave uses infrared cameras to track your hand movements on a keyboard. That visual data can be used to teach you how to play a song or to compose entirely new sonic creations. Roli, the maker of quirky, portable, and expressive digital pianos and keyboard instruments, has a new device that can both teach budding pianists how to play music and provide seasoned musicians with a new way of adding filters and effects to their songs by waving their hands and wiggling their fingers. The Roli Airwave is a 14.5-inch tall stand with a camera on top. The camera is positioned downward to track the movements of a player's fingers as they dance across a keyboard sitting at the base of the stand. The movements of a player's hands that are captured by the camera are streamed in real time onto the screen of a tablet that sits on the easel-like Airwave stand. The visuals can be used as a teaching tool to show the player which fingers should strike which keys, or offer some additional guidance on how to play a song just right. Of course, the Airwave uses machine intelligence and computer vision to track the player's hands and to offer its advice on where those hands should be placed. The system costs $299 and should start shipping in February 2025. You'll also need one of Roli's keyboards (which range from $249 to $1,399) to pair with it. If you want to use it as a teaching tool, you'll also need an iPad or other tablet to set onto the stand to supply the visuals. Roli is a company best known for its most advanced keyboard, the Seaboard. It's a piano-like controller with squishy keys that lets players change effects like pitch and timbre by sliding their fingers around on the keys or applying different amounts of pressure. That device had perhaps its most prominent moment in the limelight when Ryan Gosling briefly played one in the movie La La Land. The Airwave needs to be plugged into a tablet via USB-C, and there are apps for both Android and Apple devices. (Only the iPad 5 and Samsung Galaxy Tabs S1 or newer are supported at the moment. No phones are currently supported.) On the screen, the app will show a digital representation of the keys and the ghostly outline of your hands wiggling above them. If you are subscribed to Roli Learn, the company's $15-per-month music education subscription service, the app can use the view from the Airwave's camera to guide how you play. The system tracks specific hand movements, showing you which finger goes on which key when you're trying to play a song. It also has spatial awareness, and can nag you when your posture is not quite right -- just like a human teacher. "Basically, 100 percent of your time when you practice, you're going to practice correctly now," says Roli's CEO, Roland Lamb. "So you'll be developing good habits over time." The Airwave is an extension of the tech-based teaching methods Roli has been pursuing for years. The company also makes the light-up Piano M keyboard (formerly called Lumi Keys), which is focused on music learners and which incorporates the Roli Learn platform to teach people how to play. With the Piano M, keys light up in time with a song to show players which key to hit. But that hunt-and-peck approach -- being told which key to press and then doing it -- didn't seem to translate into enough users completing their lessons in full.

Roli Airwave brings piano learning to the third dimension

"With the simple raise of their hands, creators can transform a piano into a full orchestra, just as a conductor would, or morph mellow synth pads into searing leads with a tilt of a wrist" Learning to play piano is a hard slog, and many people - myself included - tend to start well, and then lose momentum before giving up entirely. Roli is hoping to keeping students engaged with a gesture-tracking AI teacher called the Airwave. "Music learning and playing have been far too difficult for too long: intimidating, expensive, and one-size-fits-all," said Roli's CEO, Roland Lamb. "At Roli, we are on a mission to free the music, making it possible for anyone to learn the language of music with new digital tools that open up new possibilities of human expression. With recent advances in computer vision and AI, we are finally able to innovate beyond the keys, and can now bring this human-centric technology to music learners and creators alike." At first glance, the Airwave device looks like a high-end music stand. It's fashioned from aluminum, has USB-C ports in the base along with slots for supporting an angled view of a tablet, a 3.5-mm headphone jack and a pedal input. There's also a magnetic USB port for use with a compatible Roli keyboard, such as the Piano M (formerly Lumi Keys) or the Seaboard series. It's powered by an included 60-W adapter. At the top of the stand are stereo infrared cameras that are paired with Roli's new Vision technology to enable real-time capture of the 27 joints in each hand for precise tracking of movements and gestures. The setup also works with Roli's new Piano AI technology, so as well as "seeing" hands and fingers, the system can respond to natural voice interactions, offer real-time assistance and so on. For learners, that means the AI teacher can evaluate every keystroke and tailor lessons to the individual. The learning system can help you adopt good posture, ensure you're using the right fingers to play the right notes, improve accuracy and timing, and build playing dynamics. Follow-me lessons are broken down into bite-sized chunks that you can ace before moving onto the next segment. Your digital coach is available whenever you are, keeps track of your progress, provides feedback to motivate and inspire, and helps builds great technique. Roli has already curated a song library of more than a thousand hits so far, allowing users to dive into learning firm favorites or explore new directions. There are interactive games to teach notes, melodies and chords in an entertaining way. The learning app also caters for experimentation or musical discovery in the freeplay zone. However, to unlock everything that the app has to offer, you'll need to stump up a monthly fee of $8.33 in addition to the cost of the Airwave and your Roli Piano M. That's still cheaper than a human piano teacher, but this will need to be factored into the overall cost. The app is compatible with modern tablets running iPadOS 17/Android 10 or a more recent operating platform. The Airwave also "unlocks a whole new world of intuitive musical expression" for those who have already put in the work and can tickle the ivories with the best of them. "With Roli, musicians can explore new forms of sound and expression," enthused musician and producer, Marco Parisi. "Airwave is a game-changer for creating music and in the way we perform. Every movement and gesture create a new sound unique to them, which will make music much more expressive, and could even lead to new genres of music." By way of example, a player could use hand gestures in the space above a Roli instrument to dial in modulation and/or effects. The setup comes with a bunch of sonic presets to flex and slide the sounds of piano, strings, wind instruments or synths. The IR cameras can also transform the captured gestures into MIDI Polyphonic Expression for "gesture-controlled Spatial Expression, allowing musicians to easily play complex and multi-layered sounds." This means that as well as knocking out a catchy tune on the keys, the system can be set to bring in backing instruments with a wave of the hand or supply atmospheric synthesized accompaniment. If you want to visualize "the impact of your gestures," the Airwave system can furnish you with 3D trails onscreen. The Airwave is up for pre-order now for US$299, or can be had with a 24-key Piano M with colored key illumination for $499, or a double-M bundle for $699. Shipping is expected to start from March 2025. The video below has more.

Roli Airwave system uses AI and hand tracking to teach piano

Learning an instrument is difficult for most people. That's doubly the case when attempting to learn on your own. It's the reason so many of us have dusty guitars and keyboards jammed up in our attic rafters amid the croquet mallets and badminton birdies of days past. The latest product from London-based Roli offers a ray of hope to the musically hopeless and rhythmically challenged. The Airwave is a bid to lower the barrier of entry for the piano, by leveraging hand tracking and AI, and bringing a level of customization to the process that was previously limited to in-person lessons. The Airwave is a large arching device that's compatible with existing Roli keyboards. It utilizes 3D cameras to track hand movements and gestures, bringing an added level of nuance to playing that can't be wholly captured by the keys themselves. The system works with Seaboard, the flexible keyboard that put Roli on the map just over a decade ago. More compelling, however, is its integration with Piano M. That's the rebrand of the Roli Lumi educational keyboard launched back in 2020. The Piano M's light-up keys pair with hand tracking to get a fuller picture of how the person is playing. The whole thing requires some AI, of course. For that, the company has launched Roli Music Intelligence; MI for short. Building on core technologies developed over the last decade, the platform is powered by five "keys" of technology: sound, sight, touch -- and now vision and voice," the company writes. "The ROLI MI platform will be the foundation of a roadmap of future intelligent products, starting with Airwave." Roli says the system was trained on large language models (LLM) for natural voice commands. You can ask the system for some tips, help with chords, and get access to full songs. The company is positioning the peripheral as more than just an educational tool. The hand-tracking can be used for music creation, as well -- kind of like an AI-powered theremin. "With the simple raise of their hands, creators can transform a piano into a full orchestra, just as a conductor would, or morph mellow synth pads into searing leads with a tilt of a wrist," Roli writes. "With Airwave, musicians can unlock deeper levels of creativity using 5 intuitive new dimensions: Air Raise; Air Glide; Air Tilt; Air Flex and Air Slide." Airwave is up for preorder starting Tuesday, priced at $299. The newly rebranded Piano M runs $259.

The Roli Airwave is a high-tech keyboard teaching tool inspired by the theremin

Roli is no stranger to quirky musical instruments. After all, it pioneered . The company's latest tool, however, could be its weirdest. The Roli Airwave is an that also doubles as a digital theremin. Yes, the same high-pitched theremin that has appeared on hit records like and The Airwave is basically a tall stand with a camera on top. This camera points downward to track the player's finger movements on a connected MIDI keyboard. Movements are tracked in real time and beamed to a tablet, which then displays visuals to teach users how to correctly play a song and fix any mistakes they are making. It'll even try to fix bad playing posture. The Airwave uses machine intelligence and computer vision to track the player's hands and to offer its advice on where those hands should be placed. There's some machine learning baked into this system when analyzing live footage to come up with accurate teaching methods. The affiliated app also integrates with ChatGPT, allowing for natural language queries. For instance, users can ask relevant questions about the song being learned or general-use queries about music theory. Being as how a player's hands would be occupied when in the midst of a piano tutorial, these questions can be asked by voice instead of by typing into a virtual keyboard. This won't beat interacting with a real piano tutor, but it'll likely be easier than hunting for a needle in the YouTube video haystack. "Basically, 100 percent of your time when you practice, you're going to practice correctly now," Roli's CEO, Roland Lamb, . "So you'll be developing good habits over time." The Airwave isn't just for students. The device is also being marketed as an outlet for experimental music-making. There are five inputs that adjust various parameters via hand movements. This means that players can use one to radically change the sound of the instrument being played. "With the simple raise of their hands, creators can transform a piano into a full orchestra, just as a conductor would, or morph mellow synth pads into searing leads with a tilt of a wrist," Roli wrote in a press release. Now onto the caveats, and there are a few. This is nifty tech, of that there's no doubt. However, there's a significant barrier of entry. First of all, the Airwave itself will cost $300 when it releases in February. The device cannot be used on its own. It requires a pre-existing Roli keyboard, like the or the (now called the Piano M.) Also, to access the teaching tools, users will need to bring in their own tablet. There are apps for both Android and Apple devices, but only newer iPad and Samsung Galaxy Tab models will be supported. Finally, budding piano players will also have to fork out $15 a month to access the Roli Learn music education subscription service. If money's no object, this looks like a fairly novel way to learn the piano. Roli says the Airwave is just the first release in what it's calling its Music Intelligence (MI) platform. The company writes that the "Roli MI platform will be the foundation of a roadmap of future intelligent products, starting with Airwave." Preorders for the Airwave are available right now.