Is it sound design? Or is it composition?

Here's a full exploration of the Haken Continuum, the oft-misunderstood expressive device, as a musical instrument, plus creations for the hardware.

Is it sound design? Or is it composition? Yes. Here’s a full exploration of the Haken Continuum, the oft-misunderstood expressive device, as a musical instrument, plus creations for the hardware. It might inspire you to rethink how you view digital interfaces for performance.

The Haken Continuum has helped fuel a lot of recent innovations in expression, MIDI/MPE, hardware, and software. (The sound engine is even inside the Expressive E Osmose.) But that’s about more than just technical details: there’s a scene around this device. Seeing how they set it up is likely to inspire you even if you don’તી have the hardware handy. (No wonder it has its own community event, ContinuuCon, on now in Paris at IRCAM for this year’s edition. It’s like ComicCon for people who care about this stuff. Okay, that’s also NIME; uh, maybe it’s the Dragon Con of expressive instruments.)

Josh Madoff, whose work on composing for and teaching about expressive instruments I covered recently, is back with a full guide to the Continuum. Josh writes CDM:

Haken Audio asked me to make a comprehensive video covering all of the wonderful things the Haken Continuum can do. It’s a tour of the instrument from a musicians perspective, with tons of musical examples. It was really an honor working on this.

This covers everything – each technical component, how you design sounds, how you play, and how you’d approach this in “analog” contexts.

By the same token, I love the patch design on Silver Bar. Demonstrated here by its designer, Edmund Eagan, this really questions whether a preset can actually be a kind of open-ended interactive score. From the descriptions:

This video explores some of the sonic variations that can be made within this single EaganMatrix preset, “Silver Bar.” Variations like these can be achieved by making adjustments to the Macro controls within the preset, but more significantly by employing different playing techniques and the Touch Control Area on the playing surface of the Continuum. Silver Bar employs new firmware 10.50 features in the BiqGraph Bank of the EaganMatrix. Edmund Eagan is the performer and the EaganMatrix preset designer for this video.

Haken Audio

I don’t think there are many preset demo videos that you could convincingly put on and bliss out to. Here’s one:

As if I’m not already making this point bluntly and repetitively, here is a gorgeous composition-slash-preset design complete with score, also from Edmund Eagan.

It does make me long for some alternative notational systems for these instruments. Let’s get on that. (It works well enough here, of course, but – think back to the previous video, not to mention something about this notation just seems out of place in 2025.)

But what beautiful work. If that doesn’t inspire you to go grab some instrument and make some sound patches and compositions, not much will.