Watch Roland Lamb’s Squishy Piano – the Seaboard – in Action!

American inventor Roland Lamb has taken the 17th century design of the piano into the future, with his piano, the Seaboard.

According to singer/songwriter Jamie Cullum, who’s been invited to demo the Seaboard, it feels like “somewhere between piano and food – in a good way!”

Lamb was featured on NPR: “I remember reading about Thelonious Monk, of whom it was said he was searching for the space between the black and white keys,” Lamb says. “So he’d always play these little chromatic clusters. And it was like he was pushing the instrument to its limit. And I thought, you know, maybe this is a question for design? Maybe we could reinvent the piano and actually make it capable of playing those notes between the keys.”

Lamb, 35, founded a tech start-up in Britain called Roli (after his own nickname), based in a studio and workshop in East London, to create an instrument that could do just that. 

Lamb describes the Seaboard as “a futuristic version of the piano.” Actually, it kind of looks like a cross between a keyboard and Apple’s iPod: It’s clean, sleekly designed and just a few inches thick. But instead of individual keys, there are two rows of rounded bumps that look like hot dogs sliced in half and made of grey silicone. Lamb says musicians can literally dig their fingers into these molds to create different sounds.

Music Junction Warning: Please do not model your piano fingering technique off of Jamie Cullum in this video.  Cullum’s fingers are so tense they’re bending the opposite direction of the knuckles – ouch!  When the hand is relaxed, the fingers gently curve in toward the palm.  This is the core hand position for playing piano – the fingers staying relaxed so they can move freely.   It doesn’t take much strength to push down a piano key, but the strength it does require is borrowed from the weight of the arm dropping down into the finger – not by tightening the finger.

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