In Britain over the last few days I have seen some different articles on our newspaper websites about "a new instrument". From my first impressions of what I have seen in the links below I am pretty impressed with the controls it gives you and it certainly sounds more expressive than many other electronic instruments around at the present time. It can be played in numerous ways as the video below shows, but with a price tag of £3,950 it doesn't look like I will be getting hold of one anytime soon.

In case you are wondering, in the video above they are playing a cover of a Moby track called Extreme Ways.

The Eigenharp has two sets of different keys (120 sensitive keys and 12 percussion keys), two strip controllers down the sides, breath controller and pedal and microphone inputs.


The Eigenharp still needs software to run which will currently only be available for the Mac although the software will be open source and therefore I am sure it will be ported to Windows quickly for people who use PC. Because the instrument still relies on software it does makes it seem more like a fancy controller to me rather than a new instrument. I've seen instruments like this in the past which are also trying to be more expressive, one that comes to mind is the Thummer from Thumtronics. So it certainly looks like the market for more expressive, performance friendly electronic controllers is hotting up.

Here are some links to find out more...

EigenLabs
Eigenharp Preview Video from EigenLabs
Eigenharp on Twitter

Here are some more articles about the Eigenharp...

BBC (video and article)
Wired (video and article)
The Times Online