On The Road with the Morph
The Sensel Morph is all about touch. So it's important that we get on the road and show off our technology. It's amazing how people respond to the sensor.
Superbooth
Superbooth is a three day extravaganza of all things synthesizer. Held at FEZ-Berlin, a children's museum and recreation building built in 1979 by the GDR, it maintains it's socialist 70's chic and sense of large-scale community. However, when filled with the world's inventory of patchable synthesizer and electronic music curiosities, DIY workshops for the solder-curious, and a rotating cast of small yet amazing musical stages, it is a perfect place for Europe to get to know the Morph!
Display Week
Display Week is a decidedly less artistic tradeshow. Filling the massive Los Angeles Convention Center, It is where the rubber meets the road, and companies and people gather to figure out the broad problem of how to make screens work for everything from VR to cars, your pocket to sport stadiums, the coatings on top to the transistors below, and beyond. Among the curved displays, AR, transparent displays, and other future designs, we setup some special demos to prove our superior touch technology can not only integrate into displays, but make the experience far better.
Moogfest
Moogfest, like Superbooth, presents electronic music makers, companies, and performers in a four day festival in Durham, North Carolina. No longer a tobacco economy, the only smoke you're likely to inhale is the "blue smoke" coming from an ill-advised connection in one of the synth-building workshops. With a greater emphasis on concerts, and a smaller gear expo than Superbooth, Moogfest attracts a more casual fan. That still gave a lot of people the opportunity to check out the Morph amongst the ferns, guitar pedals, synthesizers and MIDI controllers. We were also excited to find the Morph an important part of Moog’s Geert Bevin preset the Morph as an important part in a Mobile Music setup!
NIME
NIME is an academic conference that gathers researchers, students, professors, and artists pushing the boundaries of music with the aim of creating New Instruments for Musical Expression. Sensel's Peter Nyboer and Alex Grau started off the four day conference with a workshop that put the Morph in people's hands to try out the API, Max object, and the Overlay Designer to see how quickly a New Musical Instrument can be Expressed! We also setup a demo table and had incredible conversations with all the attendees.
In a crowd that takes bespoke custom instruments very seriously, we were pleased to find that most were very impressed with the Morph. And it wasn’t just demos - Rhode Island School Of Design’s Sean Greenlee performed his piece in the Virgina Tech Cube (134+ speakers!) that used a custom interface with the Morph API. We’ll be sure to get more details from him soon. We've got a few pictures below, but check out the extensive coverage from our friends at Cycling '74 - Gregory Taylor dug deep!
M-Enabling
M-Enabling is a yearly gathering in Washington DC that promotes accessible and assistive technology. Sensel has been curious from the start about the potential of the Morph (and especially the Overlay Designer) to meet the customized needs of people who have greater demand from their technology's interface. Industrial scale usually requires a one-size fits all solution, and "adaptive" technology often means the user needs to adapt, not the technology. We are excited about what we can learn about how Sensel can help find incredible solutions to make technology available for everyone of all abilities.
