Last Friday, Studio resident and nu desine founder Adam Place gave a talk about the AlphaSphere. a pressure sensitive, multi-faceted instrument (or ‘3D Space Bongo’ as Stuff Magazine once called it) that was developed with the express intention of bringing expression into the composition and performance of electronic music. As well as the AlphaSphere, which nu desine have been developing for several years now, Adam was very excited to speak to us about a new REACT funded IoT project they are embarking on, called BetaLoop. Here is a summary of some of the things discussed.

Adam began by telling us how and where he first came up with the concept of the AlphaSphere. While studying Music Tech in Brighton, Adam became obsessed by the different sounds it is possible to create with synthesisers. He told us that he wanted to create a way of manipulating these sounds in a more expressive way, so he built his first AlphaSphere from espresso cups, balloon rubber and a network of electronics. The project gained notoriety, and he received a scholarship to study in Nagoya, Japan, where he realised there was huge market potential for this sort of instrument.

Adam joined the Studio as part of a Graduate and New Talent Residency in 2010, and began to gather a team of wonderfully talented engineers and designers to work on the instrument and its software, and founded nu desine. The team secured funding from an Angel Investor, and after a couple of iterations, they built a working, robust AlphaSphere (the 0.2 edition) The BBC broke the story locally, and they took it to festivals and parties, where their reputation steadily grew. nu desine won a trade delegation to Japan with the Prime Minister, where they secured their first order of 100 units.

Since then, the AlphaSphere has been picked up by some high-profile artists, such as Mercury Award winning electronic musician and Tabla player, Talvin Singh, who called it ‘an incredible universe of an instrument’, and Enter Shikari, who have used it as headliners on the 2013 European Warped tour, and plan to once again on their tour accross the USA. Adam said that this sort of ‘marketing through culture’ has become pretty important to nu desine, and they are always keen to collaborate with musicians. Despite its success in the music world, Adam told us that the AlphaSphere is ‘not just an instrument, but also an interface which can be used to control a variety of different media. The AlphaSphere is being proposed to be used to control images and audio across a 360 degree screen at Shanghai Festival of Creativity in 2015.

After several years of working intensively on AlphaSphere, nu desine are now launching themselves into a new project, for which they have just secured REACT funding. They will be working alongside Chris Nash, the Senior Lecturer in Music Tech at UWE, who has just completed a PhD at Cambridge, studying how user interfaces influence creativity, flow and virtuosity in professional music software. The project is called BetaLoop, and will involve the creation of a device enabling musicians around the world to share and collaborate on their ideas in real time. Working around issues of latency by transforming large amounts of audio data into simple note data, the device will be able to record any instrument, and feed data describing pitch, dynamic and rhythm into a live looper instantaneously. This note pattern will be able to be heard via MIDI and the internet, by anyone with another BetaLoop device anywhere in the world. Other performers will then be able to change the continually looping pattern themselves, creating a musical performance evolving over time and continents.

nu desiner Liam gave us a demo; he hooked up a prototype device to his guitar, and fed music into the BetaLoop. We saw the notes he played being transformed into data on a screen in front of us, and a MIDI version of the notes he played began playing back to us in a continuous loop until he picked out a tune on his guitar again, altering the pattern.

After the talk, Adam announced that nu desine were going to try to break a world record, and they needed our help. The world record for the most people playing an instrument at once is currently held by 16 people on a piano. There are 48 pads on an AlphaSphere, and Adam set the Sphere up in the middle of the room so that we could all have a go at playing it at once. We managed to get 35 people on the sphere, and the nu desine team are currently in the process of preparing for an official attempt with Guinness. We’ll keep you posted with all Alphasphere, Betaloop and World Record news. For now, here's a video filmed by nu desiner Diego.