The Haken Audio Team

LIPPOLD HAKEN

Lippold Haken was born in Munich, West Germany on April 12 1961 – the day the first human was launched into space. Soon after Yuri Gagarin made his flight, Lippold’s father was offered a job as a mathematician at the University of Illinois; Americans were trying to hire more German scientists than the Russians were hiring. His father never contributed to the space race directly, but worked at the University of Illinois as a Math professor and proved the Four Color Theorem with Ken Appel.

Lippold received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering under Don Bitzer in 1989 from the University of Illinois. He lives in Champaign, Illinois with his wife and four kids, down the street from his parents. He teaches at the University of Illinois ECE department in Urbana-Champaign. His favorite class to teach is ECE402, an electronic music class for ECE seniors and graduate students. He also teaches the ECE395 laboratory class, and wants to nurture ECE students’ pride in their ability to design and build working devices. In the 1990s, together with another professor, he started the ECE110 lecture and lab, now the department’s largest class. His research has been in real-time computer music systems, music notation and representation, music technology for the blind, and analysis/synthesis/processing of musical sounds.

Lippold started working on the Continuum Fingerboard in the early 1980s when he was a student at the University of Illinois. He tried many different designs and many different finger detection technologies. It is challenging to polyphonically track the small finger movements involved in expressive playing, and at the same time have a good surface feel and sub-millisecond response. For the last 25 years he has had a design that is similar to the current Continuum, and has been making many small mechanical improvements, including improvements to the finger tracking algorithms.

The last 20years have been especially exciting; he has been working with Edmund Eagan to implement the EaganMatrix, and develop built-in sounds that are specifically designed for the Continuum’s three-dimensional playing surface.

EDMUND EAGAN

EXCEPTIONAL MUSIC AND SOUND DESIGN

Edmund Eagan is an audio manipulator extraordinaire, bringing over 27 years of professional experience to his work. This is backed by five years of university study in music composition at Ottawa and Toronto, Canada. During his career he has explored many varied musical genres, resulting in numerous award winning productions, including a Canadian television Gemini award for the music in the animated production “The Woman Who Raised a Bear as Her Son”, a Gemini for CBC’s “The Health Show”, and Gemini nominations for the music in the documentary film “FLicKeR”, the film “Curiosities” and in the Man Alive documentary “Beyond Belief”.

He has a recipient of multiple SOCAN (The Society of Composer, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada) awards in recognition of his work in film and television. As well as doing original music and sound design work, Edmund has participated in numerous audio recordings both as performer and producer, and has been extensively involved in the design and operation of a new innovative musical instrument, the Continuum Fingerboard, manufactured by Haken Audio. His audio work for film and TV commonly uses ordinary found sound as a musical source. Voices, backgrounds, ambient textures and other seemingly incidental sonic source material is manipulated to extract relevance to the sonic score. The overall effect is to enhance the content of a scene by bringing contextual meaning to the audio soundscape, including sounds that could otherwise seem superfluous.

Edmund has employed this technique frequently in his work in film, television and the web. Some examples would include his compositional work for the documentaries “Beyond Belief” and “Sandspit to Dildo”, the CBC series “Life, the Program”, the CBC specials “A Day in the Life of Nova Scotia” and “A Day in the Life of Canada”. 

CHRISTOPHE DUQUESNE

Christophe has been involved in sound synthesis for more than 30 years, with a special recent focus on physical modeling. He started his work sound using synthesizers like the Roland JUNO-6 and JX8P, Yamaha SY77 and then stepped up to more powerful platforms like the Nord Modular G2X, AAS Tassman, Max-MSP, CSound and of course, the amazing EaganMatrix.

Christophe studied electronics (ISEP Paris) and has been a software developer and system architect for more than 25 years (mainly working for public transport data exchange and standardization). He started learning classical piano at 6 and, apart from being a member of Anckorage and Sans Bagages, he is now mainly known for being a Haken Continuum player.

Christophe is co-inventor of La Voix du Luthier’s Onde and Pyramid acoustic resonators, which are fantastic for use with Continuum Fingerboards and ContinuuMinis.

Recent Sound Synthesis Endeavors:

• Designed physical modeling application SpringSound for IOS based on physical calculation of forces on mobile bodies. SpringSound also contains a IOS remote for the Continuum.

• Involved in the sound design of internal presets of the Haken Continuum (closely working with Edmund Eagan and Lippold Haken) focusing on waveguide synthesis and subtractive synthesis, and helps beta-testing the firmware updates.

• Led the implementation of the Kinetic Modeling Bank in the EaganMatrix, based on his previous implementation within SpringSound.

• Led the implementation of the Jenny Oscillator in the EaganMatrix, based on his studies of the synthesis implemented by Georges Jenny within the Ondioline.

• Works with Tiptop Audio, and has recently developed the “Grain de Folie” cartridge (granular synthesis) for their Z-DSP Eurorack module (FV1 Spin semiconductor DSP), and the upcoming “Spring Waves” (physical modeling).

• One of the sound designers of the factory library of the ROLI Seaboard (RISE 25 and 49).

• Involved in the organization of the French Synthfest

• Contributor for several web sites like the AAS Tassman forum or the Nord Modular forum on ElectroMusic.com.

“I do believe that expression, and therefore new controllers, is the next step for electronic music, and I’m also convinced that these new controllers will give their best with dedicated sound engines. So I’m always happy to very modestly help paving this road.” – Christophe Duquesne