---
title: Lippold Haken
description: Lippold Haken, inventor of the Continuum Fingerboard, the instrument Sarth Calhoun has played since Lucibel Crater and with Lou Reed.
url: https://www.sarth.net/conspirators/lippold-haken/
credit: Lippold 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.
author: Sarth Calhoun
---
[Conspirators](/conspirators/) / Lippold Haken

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](https://web.archive.org/web/20101030053745/http://www.sarth.net/category/bio/)

[Lippold Haken](https://www.hakenaudio.com/the-team) (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](/devices/) is my instrument: bass and melodies in [Lucibel Crater](/conspiracies/lucibel-crater/), Lou Reed’s band from 2008, [Metal Machine Trio](/conspiracies/metal-machine-trio/), where Lou and I both had Continuums on stage, [Yellow Pony](/conspiracies/yellow-pony/), the [*Lulu*](/conspiracies/lulu/) tapes and the Metallica sessions, and the duets of [Introspections](/transmissions/introspections/). After watching videos of me playing it at [Lollapalooza](/transmissions/lou-reed-live-at-lollapalooza-2009/), he said he lost sleep. The Continuum and Kyma come out of the same lab: he and [Kurt Hebel](/conspirators/kurt-hebel/) built the Platypus DSP together at CERL in 1983.

The credit: Lippold 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.

The profile is from public sources, linked where they appear. What we made is the record on this site and the sources cited above.