British music tech startup Roli wants to redefine the way you think about playing a keyboard. We checked in with Roli at Getgeeked New York, part of CE Week, to find out more about its signature device, the Seaboard RISE midi controller. It offers gesture-based controls called “5D Touch,” which gives musicians an expanded musical toolkit and more control than your average keyboard.
“Our goal is to expand the bandwidth of interaction between humans and technology,” Roli operations coordinator Danny Siger said. “That sounds lofty, but what really we want to do is enable music creators to be more powerful and more expressive.”
Both the 25 and 49 models of the Rise look just enough like a standard keyboard to let you know you could play it the old-fashioned way, while being unambiguous about the fact that it is something else. Rather than keys, the Rise features a large silicone “keywave” pad with sensors to detect precise movements. (There are bumps in the silicone to emulate standard keys.) In addition to pressing a key, which Roli refers to as striking, players can press and hold a spot on the board, wiggle their fingers on a key horizontally, or slide their finger up and down an individual key to create different variations on individual tones.
“We created a brand-new musical instrument,” Siger said, “[but] we didn’t necessarily create the way to play it. It’s kind of like moving from an acoustic guitar to an electric guitar. People develop new capabilities and abilities because of that interface change. You didn’t know that a guitar could do what Jimi Hendrix did with a guitar until he did it on the guitar: It’s been amazing to see people create new types of play for this.”
The Rise has custom sound-editing software to specifically edit the distinctive components of its compositions. It is also compatible with a host of sound-editing software platforms and audio workstations. It also supports a mobile emulator app, which allows users to design music remotely and transfer it to the Rise when you’re back in front of it.
The Seaboard RISE is available now.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.