Conspirator
Lippold Haken
Inventor of the Continuum Fingerboard, my instrument.
I lost sleep. I even dreamt about it last night. It was one of those thousands-of-people-watching nightmares.
Lippold Haken, after watching Sarth Calhoun play the Continuum at Lollapalooza, quoted on sarth.net, 2010
Lippold Haken (born 1961, Munich) is the inventor of the Continuum Fingerboard, a polyphonic touch surface that tracks each finger in three dimensions for continuous-pitch performance, and the founder of Haken Audio in Champaign, Illinois. He began the instrument in the early 1980s as a student in the CERL Sound Group at the University of Illinois, earned his PhD there in 1989, and taught electrical and computer engineering at Illinois until his retirement; Continuum sales began in 2000. With Edmund Eagan he developed the EaganMatrix, the synthesizer built into later Continuums.
The Continuum
The Continuum is my instrument: bass and melodies in Lucibel Crater, Lou Reed’s band from 2008, Metal Machine Trio, where Lou and I both had Continuums on stage, Yellow Pony, the Lulu tapes and the Metallica sessions, and the duets of Introspections. After watching videos of me playing it at Lollapalooza, he said he lost sleep. The Continuum and Kyma come out of the same lab: he and Kurt Hebel built the Platypus DSP together at CERL in 1983.
The creditLippold Haken invented the Continuum Fingerboard, Sarth Calhoun’s instrument since Lucibel Crater and in Lou Reed’s band, Metal Machine Trio, Yellow Pony and Lulu; Wikipedia’s Continuum article names Calhoun among its players.
My thoughts
The profile is from public sources, linked where they appear. What we made is the record on this site and the sources cited above.