710025The Seaboard: a musical instrument for the twenty-first centuryClosedGRD Proof of ConceptInnovate UKOur business opportunity is to take a share of the following markets: conventional, analogue keyboard instruments (i.e. pianos); electronic digital keyboards; synthesizers; and music technology including both hardware and software. We will also create a new market for instruments for digital music composition and performance. These markets as a whole are now approximately $14bn per annum. In the field of music, there is a growing divide between traditional and high-tech ways of making music. On the one hand, traditional instruments have many inherent limitations built into them, but are capable of great depth of expression. On the other hand, powerful new digital ways of making music and editing sound have emerged that have changed the way music is created, recorded, edited, and performed. Despite the benefits, these new technologies are often: • inaccessible without formal training • difficult to integrate into a coherent system • difficult to use in real-time • generally time-consuming • impossible to use a musically intuitive way • costly despite having limited functionality In sum, the digital revolution that has changed personal computing, phones, photography, and many other fields has not yet fully come to fruition in the field of music production. The Seaboard, based on patent-pending technology, will fill this unaddressed niche, by solving these problems and bringing about a radical integration of these two previously separate ways of making music. In order to ensure that we take advantage of this opportunity, we aim to conduct enough research to enable a first product version of the Seaboard to be sufficiently refined and include the necessary minimum-function set for successful market entry. To do this, we need to complete our proof of concept research, testing, and validation process before developing a pre-production prototype. We seek to deliver products that will change the way that people create music and put the tools of high-quality music-making into more peoples hands. London in particular and the UK in general is a world centre for design, music, and culture, and we believe that with the TSB's help, we can make a contribution towards its growth as a global hotspot for innovation. Completing our key objectives for proof of concept will put us in position to create a preproduction prototype to a specification that is based on evidence from potential customers. We need to bridge the gap between our current stage of innovation and where we need to be to optimize the feature and specification set for market entry, and the TSB ‘proof of concept’ grant would help us enormously to do this.