Musicians may remember me mentioning the JazzMutant Lemur (recently dragged into the limelight by French act Daft Punk), well, there's a new kid on the block that utilises true multi-touch operation, except this has a more traditional 88-key look to it -- enter the Haken Audio Continuum performance keyboard.



The Continuum offers realtime continuous control in three directions for every finger that is placed on the playing surface. The Continuum is compatible with any MIDI synthesizer, sound module, or sequencer, and can also communicate via Firewire.

If you think that's cool, wait til you see Haken's performance demonstration of the Continuum being used to operate a MIDI controlled Tesla coil!

This has actually been around for awhile... (I don't normally make those comments, but for you, Brains, I made an exception )

On a related note, when I saw Bjórk play a few months ago, her backing band was using both a MBP and a Lemur... and the drummer had some crazy rig with both trigger pads and an LCD mounted beside his drums. You could see the guy playing with the lemur to mess with synth patches on the huge screens, it was awesome!