Haken Audio was founded by Lippold Haken, a professor of electrical and computer engineering that first started to experiment with alternative control surfaces for electronic music in the 1980s, which eventually developed into Haken’s Continuum range of musical instruments built in close collaboration with musician/composer Edmund Eagan and software developer and synthesist Christophe Duquesne.

Unlike most electronic musical instruments on the market, the Continuum is an instrument that closely interlinks its control mechanism and sound engine with a unique multidimensional playing surface and a highly reactive sound engine designed to interact with the Continuum’s sensitive playing capabilities.

In this interview with Lippold Haken and Edmund Eagan, the two go into the history and inspiration behind the instrument, their unique approach to electronic instrument design, the strengths and pitfalls of MIDI, and their new EaganMatrix Micro standalone device.

What first got you interested in musical instruments?

Lippold Haken: I grew up playing the violin. I was never very good at it, but was forced to practice it across my childhood (laughs). When I got into electronics later, I was then surprised that everything was so dominated by keyboards. And don’t get me wrong, keyboards are great, but I found it odd that in electronic music they had just totally taken over, there wasn’t much else in terms of control mechanisms.

So I eventually got interested in doing electronic music with other control mechanisms that give the player more feedback when playing. Keyboards are great because they are so simple — you hit the lever at the right time and you’re mostly good — but with instruments like a violin or a trumpet, there’s a much more dynamic interaction between the player and the instrument that I really enjoy. I just wanted to make something that is closer to that level of interaction.

Edmund Eagan: I first became aware of the Continuum around the year 2000 when I went to an immersion weekend in Illinois because I was involved with Symbolic Sound's Kyma, which is a very open-ended and powerful system and I’d always been interested in the more exploratory side of electronic music.

So in adjunction to that I got introduced to Lippold and got to play around with the Continuum for the first time. And I didn’t think that much of it for a while (laughs), but then around six months later I decided I wanted to buy one. And you know, it’s funny because I was thinking I was dealing with the “Haken corporation,” but it was just Lippold — and to this day the Continuum units are hand-made in his basement — and I was actually his second or third ever customer (laughs).

Lippold Haken: I think you were my third customer (laughs).

Edmund Eagan: I quickly came to love this very expressive concept behind the Continuum, but I also had a couple questions and observations. I then quickly realized that Lippold was very open to my ideas and we started a working relationship when we realized that our skill sets are quite complementary.

Can you say something about the design philosophy behind the Continuum?

Edmund Eagan: We’ve always had this mandate of really trying to make the instrument as immediate as possible, having it accurately reflect the information you are putting into it and feeding that back to the user so they can respond to the instrument quickly in real time. That was the driving force behind the Continuum, the expressivity of the human performance creating a feedback loop with this instrument whose sound is itself heavily based on the idea of non-linear feedback dynamically responding to the user’s playing.

That is not to say that we think that this approach is necessarily the be-all and end-all of electronic music making — I also greatly enjoy just letting the sound work for itself with my Eurorack system — but there is something very unique and beautiful about playing the Continuum.

It is definitely expensive relative to a lot of other electronic music equipment, but in the grand scheme of things, it is an instrument that you can learn and work with for a very long time, we are still working with Continuum units that are twenty or thirty years old now. From that perspective, it’s funny for us to be at trade shows where it’s always “what’s new what’s new what’s new?” (laughs). What’s new for us is that we are continuing to develop it.

Lippold Haken: At my day job in academia it was the same thing — you’re not supposed to write a paper about continuing what you’ve been doing, you’re supposed to write about what’s “new”. So that was never the most effective approach for either academia or the musical instruments business (laughs).

But you know, going back to what Ed said, once I met him, I quickly realized there’s really three parts to the Continuum. The first is the performer, who is in a dynamic feedback loop with the instrument that requires constant adjustments, just like with a Theremin.

Then there’s the Continuum playing surface itself, which is incredibly sensitive, more sensitive than you are. Just like with a trumpet, it’s impossible to play something that sounds like a triggered sample, it will always sound slightly different because it’s so sensitive to these fine playing nuances.

And then thirdly, there’s the player’s input feeding back to them through the instrument in accordance to their performance. For the first half of my career, I really struggled with how to adequately translate such a complex feedback relationship. I had been working on a lot of implementation ideas, but then when I met Ed I quickly realized that those approaches were all wrong (laughs).

So I figured it was best to just follow Ed’s ideas on that and with the EaganMatrix, you have all these complex feedback paths and the performer is itself a part of that very dynamic feedback loop. This kind of interaction is quite different from what most MPE controllers are. People expect to be able to use any controller with any synthesis engine, but I think the best use of MPE is one that is specifically designed and refined in accordance to the synthesis engine that you are controlling.

Were there are any predecessors that inspired you during the development of the Continuum?

Lippold Haken: The Theremin was definitely an inspiration, and the Theremin is also closely related to the first version of the Ondes Martenot which has a similar approach to synthesis but a totally different control mechanism, which leads you to ultimately get quite different sounds out of these instruments.

Martenot also developed all sorts of other brilliant ideas and control mechanisms, some of them were also taking inspiration from Friedrich Trautwein's Trautonium. So I would say the Martenot, the Trautonium and the Theremin were big inspirations, but there’s also other ones like George Jenny's Ondioline, which was an instrument that was really way ahead of its time in a lot of ways.

You know, it’s funny, when I first started with electronic music at the beginning of the 80s it was actually less of a keyboard-centric landscape than we have now, because this was before MIDI and you had things like the CS-80 that were trying to do things with control mechanisms beyond just having a keyboard. There was less interchangeability between the sound and the control of an instrument than what you later got when MIDI arrived.

Of course, MIDI was also great in that you suddenly could just hook up any keyboard to any synthesizer. But it was almost too great, because it quickly led to keyboards becoming generic, where they all roughly work in the same way and generate the same kind of output data. What you lose with that kind of generic paradigm are the unique and specific playing expressions that acoustic players develop over years of practice with their instrument.

Edmund Eagan: We’ve had situations where a musician or composer gets a contract for a big upcoming project like a movie, and they contact us under the assumption that they’ll be able to just pick up the Continuum and be able to play it within the next few weeks, like you would with most keyboard synthesizers.

But like Lippold says, you would never do that with an acoustic instrument like a violin, and the Continuum is similar in that way, although it definitely is a much easier instrument to learn than the violin. But if you are only used to generic MIDI keyboards, the Continuum is a very different kind of paradigm that requires adjustment and practice. It’s not a keyboard and it’s not meant to replace a conventional keyboard, it’s something else entirely.

Lippold Haken: And don’t get me wrong, there is incredible skill in keyboard-based electronic music, but it is usually more in the sound design and composition than the actual playing. Whereas with the Continuum, there is a sound design aspect, but it is ultimately really an instrument that is about what you do with your fingers.

Edmund Eagan: What’s interesting about the Continuum — and this also goes for most acoustic instruments — is that the way you play it becomes an expression of your personality. You can recognize people based just on their playing style. Even though we have tried to make it as flexible as possible, it’s not an instrument that is about doing everything, it’s about exploring particular areas in the pursuit of perfection — something you will never actually achieve, but that continuous striving for mastery is really something beautifully human, I think.

Do you also get inspired by the way that other people play the Continuum?

Lippold Haken: Just the other week, there was this really excellent organist from Britain and it was really fascinating to see them play the Continuum because they’ve borrowed all sorts of things from pipe organ technique that figure into their approach to playing it. We also have some Continuum players in India that play Indian music with it and they have their own techniques too, which is really interesting.

Edmund Eagan: They like a wider vibrato, so they developed their own playing technique where they play with a cluster of fingers rather than a single finger like you usually would.

Lippold Haken: They have other techniques too, with these long sustained drones for example — you know, it’s actually often quite difficult for me to tell what exactly someone is doing with the Continuum, even though I am the person that built it (laughs).

Edmund Eagan: As another example, for me — because I grew up playing the piano and piano scales — when I play something like a D-major scale on the Continuum, I finger it in the same way that I would on a piano even though it is a completely flat surface, just because I have that ingrained muscle memory.

As we’ve said, these kinds of mechanical playing skills and techniques are something we always take into account when designing sounds for the EaganMatrix engine, which has very deep capabilities for responding to the user’s playing. It’s a highly interrelated and specific system between the sound and the control surface, but the EaganMatrix engine is also very flexible, so it can be made to fit different control and playing approaches.

Was bringing that flexibility to more users a motivation behind the new EaganMatrix Micro?

Edmund Eagan: The Micro was a great opportunity for us, because we were able to take the sound engine from the Continuum Mini, remove the playing surface and put it into a small standalone package with a much lower price that also doesn’t require a modular system like the EaganMatrix module.

It’s connected via USB, so it’s as ubiquitous as any other music device and the user has a lot of capabilities for connection. Personally, I actually prefer to control the EaganMatrix Micro with a Continuum MIDI (laughs), just because for me it’s the best compact pitch surface, but we have also licensed the EaganMatrix engine for the Expressive-E Osmose and have built sounds for the xyz Warbl, which is a really great control surface as well.

You can find out more about Haken Audio, the Continuum and the EaganMatrix, over at their website.