Artiphon releases Orbasynth: A Powerful Preset Creator for Orba's Internal MPE Synth

Artiphon customers can now download a free, gesture-mappable synthesizer that allows for extensive customization of Orba sounds. 

Your favorite musical grapefruit just got a lot more customizable. Orba players now have access to the internal sound engine that creates Orba’s sonic palette. Orba’s synth was designed from the ground up with a focus on intuitively translating simple gestures directly into music. Orbasynth is a standalone desktop app for Mac & Windows available for free at artiphon.com/downloads.  

Since releasing Orba, “I want to create my own presets” has been a request we’ve received over and over. Orba is a gesture-based, MIDI polyphonic expression (MPE) synth and controller with multiple playing modes and complex routing. So until now, presets had to be carefully designed and curated by just a handful of sound engineers. But now, we’re pleased to finally offer this fun, interactive feature for Orba players to explore.

With the Orbasynth app, you can now connect your Orba and quickly see how expansive your instrument becomes. Tweak sounds or completely reinvent instruments to your liking. Orba has nine simultaneous playing gestures, more than any other MPE controller on the market. With Orbasynth you’ll be able to map Velocity, Press, Radiate, Tilt, and Move to control multiple synth parameters at once. Because Orba is an MPE controller and Orbasynth is an MPE synth, every pad you tap can independently control several MIDI CCs for any of Orba’s three melodic modes: Bass, Chord, and Lead. 

Once you’ve crafted a sound you love, you can easily save it to the Orba App, send it to your own Orba, or share it with a friend. It’s a fun new way to add your fingerprint to the music you create with Orba.

Orbasynth features: 

• Morphing oscillators that mix saw, triangle, and novel harmonic-rich waveforms, with variable-width pulse waveforms that change dynamically with dedicated envelopes.
   

• Three ADSR dynamic envelopes allow the synth tones to be sculpted by the player’s continuous playing on Orba’s capacitive-sensitive playing surface and respond to note-on and note-off velocities. Two different envelopes can control the two oscillators, noise, and the ring modulator while the third one controls a resonant filter.
   

• A waveguide allows for physical modeling, creating unique instruments that have an acoustic-like familiarity. Orbasynth has two modes that emulate string and pipe harmonic structures.
   

• Reverb, Delay, and Chorus effects provide sounds that range from subtle ambient air to dense sonic textures.
   

• Map Orba gestures to synth destinations like filter cutoff and resonance, oscillator level, vibrato, harmonic, saw/triangle mix, harmonic mix. noise level, and LFO rate.
   

• You can also just spin the knobs until it sounds cool.

Orbasynth is free (for now) and available at Artiphon.com/downloads. Though you can play with and hear Orbasynth using any MIDI controller, it’s been designed to create presets specifically for Orba (in stock and available at Artiphon.com). Happy playing! 

Meet Orbacam: The Musical Camera App

Now with onscreen playing, Orbacam by Artiphon is the first app in the world that lets you create music directly in videos on your iPhone, no instrument required.    

We all know how to add popular music to TikToks and Reels, but it’s always been a challenge to create your own music and synchronize with video. In the past, you’d have to play a real instrument, record and mix it, and then sync up your music with video. And if you wanted to add fun visual effects, that’s yet another app.
 

Enter Orbacam 2.0, a multimedia musical instrument that blurs the lines between music creation and social video production. With just a few taps, you can simultaneously shoot video, make music, and add perfectly synced visual effects. Orbacam 2.0 is a brand new way for anyone to create musical videos in seconds, even if they’ve never played an instrument or produced videos before. 

Watch Orbacam 2.0 in action (Link)

Orbacam lets you create on-the-fly musical selfies, soundtrack your world, and turn everyday moments into Fantasia-like dreamscapes. Add a beautiful soundtrack to your coffee break in the park. Sync a driving beat to your skate video – with music you made yourself. Or turn otherwise boring moments into musical jokes for your friends and followers. You can even score your memories by importing videos and photos right from your camera roll and add music after the fact. 

“We want music making to be as immediate and accessible as other forms of media have become,” explains Mike Butera, Artiphon’s founder and CEO. “We don’t hesitate to take pictures or videos throughout our day, and now Orbacam lets you create music in seconds, wherever you are. All you need is your phone and a few moments to make something expressive and beautiful.”

Orbacam originally launched last year as a companion app for Artiphon’s best-selling Orba instrument, a palm-sized instrument and looper. Orbacam 2.0 uses Orba’s simple circular interface right on the touchscreen, so that anyone can immediately add music or beats to video in real time. 

Along with opening up Orbacam to anyone with an iPhone or iPad, Artiphon continues to add new sounds and visuals to the app. Orbacam’s ever-expanding audio library offers an array of traditional and novel sounds, from ethereal harp strings to fat and fuzzy synth bass, letting you play and mash up any musical genre, style, and era. Orbacam 2.0 includes new VFX as well, such as Glitch, an 80s-inspired visual that adds a VHS tracking effect with each new note.
 

About Artiphon 

Artiphon designs smart instruments for the next billion musicians. The company’s electronics products, Orba and INSTRUMENT 1, are award-winning handheld smart instruments that let anyone create music wherever they go. Artiphon’s founder/CEO Mike Butera holds a Ph.D. in Sound Studies, and Artiphon’s investors include Warner Music Group, Shure Microphones, and other industry leaders.

Learn more at artiphon.com/orbacam

Download the app here: 

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/orbacam-by-artiphon/id1506030954

Artiphon’s Orba Unlocks Educational and Therapeutic Benefits of Music Making

An intuitive new musical device is gaining popularity in social-emotional learning.

Artiphon’s Orba in a remote-learning environment

From beat-making workshops in Brooklyn to one of California’s largest school districts, a new wave of educators and music therapists are embracing emerging music tech to reach young people in fresh ways, tapping into the emotional awareness and intellectual benefits that music making imparts. These innovations have additional importance now, as many students have seen major disruptions to their school and home lives due to the pandemic.

Artiphon, a company at the cutting edge of music technology, has been designing new musical instruments and apps that make music more approachable for people of all ages. Their newest product, a handheld all-in-one instrument called Orba, is being adopted by teachers and music therapists eager to use new tools to deliver the cognitive, emotional, and social benefits of music. 

Why Teachers and Therapists are Using Orba

Orba is intuitive, with just eight pads for playing drums, basslines, chord progressions, and melodies – all tuned to pre-set keys that let avid musicians and beginners alike start creating immediately. Orba’s highly-sensitive playing surface, combined with expressive gestures like Tilt and Radiate, add unique inflection to people’s playing even if they are new to music.

Orba’s adaptability is a big part of why teachers love it. Orba can be played as a stand-alone songmaker, with Drum, Bass, Chord, and Lead modes that can be recorded on the built-in looper. With an integrated speaker and headphone jack, it’s like having a music studio in your hands. Orba also connects to the software most used in classrooms, including Soundtrap and GarageBand, fitting smoothly with familiar workflows. 

Empowered by the Artiphon community

Artiphon has been able to donate instruments to music educators and therapists, in part thanks to its own user community. When Orba launched on Kickstarter in 2019, over 12,000 backers were given an opportunity to “give one and get one,” whereby Artiphon shared the cost of donating an Orba to the field of music education, wellness, and research. To date, over 100 instruments have been sent to programs including Little Kids Rock, The Bob Moog Foundation, The Institute for Music and Neurological Function, and many others. (You can request a donation here)

Examples of Orba in the field

Campers like this young musician at Camp Mixtape use Orba to compose and record their own albums

• The non-profit Boyle Heights Arts Conservatory uses Orba to offer music lessons to incarcerated teenagers in the California correctional system to promote healing through transformative arts education. 

• The Anaheim public school district, with over 15,000 elementary students, is piloting Orba to support Social-Emotional Learning in its music programs. The curriculum, called Orba and Feelings, teaches students to use sounds, rhythms, and melodies to articulate their emotional states.  

• Notes for Notes, a national non-profit, uses Orba in its innovative distance-teaching program with Pittsburgh public schools, where instructors teach via Zoom to students in the classroom. 

• This summer, New York-based Building Beats taught a summer beat-making workshop to teens in Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn, part of a community initiative to reduce violence exacerbated by the pandemic. 

• Music therapists, ranging from private practitioners to Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital, have found Orba to be a powerful tool when working with their patients for several reasons, including Orba’s ergonomic shape and feather-touch sensitivity.

A student at the Reece school customizes their Orba with the companion app

About Artiphon

Founded in 2011 and based in Nashville, TN, Artiphon designs smart instruments for the next billion musicians by combining hardware, software, and shareable content that anyone can play. 

Launched via Kickstarter, the company’s hardware products - Orba and INSTRUMENT 1 - are award-winning handheld smart instruments that let anyone create music wherever they go. Their software products include Scan Band, an AR instrument lens in partnership with Snapchat, and Orbacam, an expansion of Orba allowing players to create musical videos enhanced with reactive visual effects. 

Artiphon’s founder/CEO Mike Butera holds a Ph.D. in Sound Studies, and Artiphon’s investors include Warner Music Group, Shure Microphones, and other industry leaders. 

Artiphon encourages educators and wellness practitioners to use its education discount.

Artiphon releases Orbacam, empowering Orba players to instantly create augmented musical videos

Pioneering company behind Orba launches a free companion iOS app on October 19, 2021

Artiphon’s Orbacam expands the popular Orba instrument into a creative multimedia studio. Orba players can link their phones and begin transforming their songs into augmented video creations. Orbacam lets players lay down multilayer loops and enhance their videos with musically reactive visual effects. 

Orbacam lets you create a musical selfie on the go, add a meditative tone to your morning coffee, or compose the orchestral score for sunset in real time. The results are colorful, highly-shareable musical videos that sync automatically with whatever you’re playing on Orba.
 

See Orbacam in action 

Orbacam was inspired by Orba users themselves. As Artiphon’s team saw thousands of social videos created by Orba players—from overjoyed kids to experienced influencers, producers, and musicians—they wondered what they could do to make the process even easier and more engaging. So, they developed Orbacam to expand the multimedia capabilities of the already beloved instrument.

With Orbacam, it’s easy to jump between Drum, Bass, Chord, and Lead modes. The sounds and visual effects are baked right into the video export, no audio routing or post-production required. You can even mix in your phone’s microphone to sing or rap over your beat, shoot video as you play live, or import videos and photos from your camera roll to add a soundtrack after the fact.

See Orbacam in action here, and download the app at artiphon.com/downloads. The app will be free at launch for Orba users.
 

Learn more about how Orba and Orbacam work together in this 1-minute overview video

In addition to Orba and Orbacam, Artiphon’s highly intuitive instruments include a recent collaboration with Snap on an AR lens called Scan Band. Artiphon imagines music-making as an activity that fits into everyone’s lives, no matter their level of ambition or skill.
 

“We believe that music is always a multisensory experience, and we designed Orbacam as an auditory, visual, and tactile experience that anyone can play immediately,” reflects Artiphon founder and CEO Mike Butera. “We’ve seen the power of synchronizing music with social content, but almost all of that is just pasting someone else’s song on your video. Now people can create musical videos that are entirely their own.”

About Artiphon

Founded in 2011 and based in Nashville, TN, Artiphon designs smart instruments for the next billion musicians by combining hardware, software, and shareable content that anyone can play. The company’s electronics products, Orba and INSTRUMENT 1, are award-winning handheld smart instruments that let anyone create music wherever they go. Artiphon’s founder/CEO Mike Butera holds a Ph.D. in Sound Studies, and Artiphon’s investors include Warner Music Group, Shure Microphones, and other industry leaders. 

www.artiphon.com 

Artiphon sprang from a simple realization: digital music creation enables anyone to make any sound in the world, but most people don’t realize that yet. 

Despite amazing technological advances, the creation process remains remarkably intimidating. For tens of millions of new people to start making music, the barrier between musician and non-musician needed to fall. So the startup from Nashville began designing highly intuitive smart instruments, physical and virtual, that could be played by everyone instantly.

The response was overwhelming. Artiphon’s INSTRUMENT 1, a digital device that lets you play music in many different ways, broke Kickstarter’s funding record for a music-making product, and made TIME’s list of best inventions in 2015. Artiphon repeated the feat for Orba, a round, handheld instrument that looks more like a game controller than a traditional instrument. Over $1.4 million in preorders poured in, and major retailers clamored to stock it. Orba won over The New York Times’ Wirecutter as the perfect antidote to the quarantine blues. Along with enthusiastic users, the music industry has gotten behind this innovative team. Warner Music Group led its seed round, which included Shure Microphones, Alex Chung from GIPHY, and a circle of Nashville angel investors.

But building cool new musical objects was just the start: Artiphon is also creating virtual instruments anyone can play. The company partnered earlier this year with Snapchat to create a musical lens called Scan Band. Scan Band lets users point their smartphone cameras at everyday objects (such as plants, pets, and food) to reveal colorful stickers that you can reach out and play. For example, you can transform a bowl of fruit into a virtual rock band or turn your dog into a drum machine.

A single motivation inspires these efforts: to bring music into the hands of more people of all skill levels. “Until recently, you could only make certain sounds with expensive instruments and ten thousand hours of practice. Digital music blew open those doors, but way too wide for most people to comprehend easily,” explains Artiphon founder Mike Butera, who holds a Ph.D. in Sound Studies. “We wanted to bring all the sounds to users’ fingertips, regardless of skill or experience. Every sound is out there, just waiting for you to touch it.” 

Artiphon found that designing instruments around basic human ergonomics and gestures leads to more natural interactions and immediate enjoyment from players. Orba was inspired by game controllers and incorporates a haptic motor, gyroscope, and capacitive touch, all designed to respond with nuance to a user’s movements. Its body is made from a special glass-infused polymer that’s especially durable for gestural play. Orba can make music right out of the box and syncs with its cross-platform app to change sounds and save songs. And Orba can sync via MIDI to other devices and hardware, allowing it to expand to meet music makers wherever they are.

INSTRUMENT 1 and Orba inspired thousands of people to post videos of themselves playing, and as it turns out, two-thirds of Orba players have never played an instrument before. These instruments also inspire more advanced musicians and producers in their craft. T-Pain went to bat for INSTRUMENT 1, featuring it as part of his School of Business, and TikTok and Instagram are full of lo-fi beat makers and heavyweight influencers playing Artiphon instruments. 

This expansive vision of music making informs all of Artiphon’s products, be they physical or virtual. They all aim to usher in a future when shareable music-making experiences are woven into our everyday habits and interactions. In this future, everyone will have every sound in the world at their fingertips, ready to express whatever emotion they wish. “People want to create multisensory music and go beyond historical limitations of traditional instruments,” Butera explains. “Like information, sounds want to be free. In the next few years, billions more people are going to realize they can be musical, and we’re excited to bring this future closer than ever before.” 

About Artiphon

Founded in 2011 and based in Nashville, TN, Artiphon designs smart instruments for the next billion musicians by combining hardware, software, and shareable content that anyone can play. The company’s electronics products, Orba and INSTRUMENT 1, are award-winning handheld smart instruments that let anyone create music wherever they go. Artiphon’s founder/CEO Mike Butera holds a Ph.D. in Sound Studies, and Artiphon’s investors include Warner Music Group, Shure Microphones, and other industry leaders.