Menlo Park (CA) - The high-tech market, with its constant fast-paced evolution often provides surprises, but today's announcement is definitely one of the least expected corporate acquisitions, taking by surprise even the experts. What we're referring to is the acquisition of Korg, the historical japanese brand specializing in musical electronics, by Facebook.
The interest of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in synthesizers is well known, but still nobody really expected a commercial move as this one, pointing towards an increased spread of the great web corporation towards different areas.
During the press conference, the first product of the newly incorporated brand, soon to be released on the market, was announced: it is a keyboard synthesizer that will surely cause a great stir in competitors, and which exhibits several innovative features, leveraging on Facebook's strengths.
The new synthesizer, aptly called KORK (arguably for KORg Keyboard)
exhibits a rather standard layout, except maybe for the 36-inch colour touch screen and the 168-key keyboard, with mini-keys not to exceed the 3 meter length limit set by the designers.
The real news all lie under the hood, in the management software of this powerful machine, whose operating system, still under development, is based on total integration with the network.
One of the most trivial aspects is the possibility of sharing patches with all other users in real time: by just pressing the "I like it" button on the front panel one can allow the patch popularity to increase, and every time the machine is turned on, a new set of popular patches will appear on board, chosen among the hottest of the week.
The network connection also allows to forget about the usual memory limitations: gone are the times of saving patches on floppy disks, CDs, SD cards or USB sticks, with the risk of missing those when they are needed. KORK has a limited internal memory because it saves all programs and patches in the cloud, on the net, for a virtually unlimited storage capacity.
If you wonder how can this feature be exploited when playing in a location with no network connection, just note that the machine hosts two SIM card slots (one reserved for data traffic and the second one for normal voice, allowing phone calls also during a performance thanks to the integrated handsfree speaker), and moreover it incorporates a special "preload" mode. The user just needs to use a simple procedure to download the required sequence of patches beforehand, in a place where a network connection is available, and these will be stored in the internal volatile memory, to be automatically recalled by the KORK before each new song, each time all keys are released, or whenever it detects a key change (therefore a song change).
As explained by the project leader, dr. Oohmee Godznezz, this is just one of many innovative features based on the registered MIDI Network Transfer technology (MINT).
Another revolutionary feature is Korg Online Organized Licks (KOOL):
this system allows to enriching the player's performance in real-time by exploiting what other users are playing in the very same moment anywhere else in the world. One just needs to set the BPM tempo and the key of the musical piece, and by pressing a button the keyboard will play a musical phrase downloaded from the network, straight from the performance of some other user. A musical style selector helps to ensure that the piece of music blends nicely with the performance: for the time being the designers have implemented ten musical genres among the most popular ones, to be expanded in the future: Pop, Rock, Jazz, Gospel, Appalachian, Taiko, Yuka, Min'yo, Heikyoku, Umui.
The very same technology provides many other possibilities, such as the KOrg KOrrector (KOKO), which allows to fix user playing mistakes such as hitting the wrong key: when the machine detects that the user pressed the key for a note not belonging to the key of the musical piece, or not exactly on the beat, it will automatically fix it, resulting in a better performance. As an example, if you set a piece to be in C major key and press an F sharp, the keyboard will actually play a G (sometimes, more rarely, an F).
There's even more: the keyboard will store (over the network) every musical phrase which is being played, and when it later detects its first notes being played, it will complete it for us automatically, regardless of the keys the user actually hits; this is indeed a feature many players have been waiting for since a long time.
Coming to the low points, to be somewhat expected in such a kind of incorporation, we must say they are really minor: the ads on the screen are not that large, and when it comes to editing a parameter, the required waiting time before the ad ends is totally acceptable.
Booting time at startup is still somewhat large, around 23 minutes, but we have been told that this will be improved in production units, dropping for sure below 15.
Many future expansions are foreseen for KORK, as well as the possibility for users to subscribe for getting completely free unlimited software upgrades and libraries: one just needs to allow the installation of the Korg Advertisement Online System (KAOS), which
drives - at random times - short commercial jingles through the main outputs, discreetly merging with the played music.
Despite some initial reserves, we must admit this to not to be too an invasive feature, when thinking to the possibility of always having an up-to-date machine for free. For the time being the jingles are downloaded randomly from the network, but a selective system is being developed which allows matching the ad with the music being played, just to avoid situations as during the demo, when an ad for erectile dysfunction tablets played during the final section of the slow movement of a sonata by Benedetto Marcello.
Summarizing, we are very eager to get our hands on the KORK by Korg-Facebook, whose street price has not yet been announced, and we have no doubts it really is the feature-packed product all keyboard players were waiting for.
The interest of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in synthesizers is well known, but still nobody really expected a commercial move as this one, pointing towards an increased spread of the great web corporation towards different areas.
During the press conference, the first product of the newly incorporated brand, soon to be released on the market, was announced: it is a keyboard synthesizer that will surely cause a great stir in competitors, and which exhibits several innovative features, leveraging on Facebook's strengths.
The new synthesizer, aptly called KORK (arguably for KORg Keyboard)
exhibits a rather standard layout, except maybe for the 36-inch colour touch screen and the 168-key keyboard, with mini-keys not to exceed the 3 meter length limit set by the designers.
The real news all lie under the hood, in the management software of this powerful machine, whose operating system, still under development, is based on total integration with the network.
One of the most trivial aspects is the possibility of sharing patches with all other users in real time: by just pressing the "I like it" button on the front panel one can allow the patch popularity to increase, and every time the machine is turned on, a new set of popular patches will appear on board, chosen among the hottest of the week.
The network connection also allows to forget about the usual memory limitations: gone are the times of saving patches on floppy disks, CDs, SD cards or USB sticks, with the risk of missing those when they are needed. KORK has a limited internal memory because it saves all programs and patches in the cloud, on the net, for a virtually unlimited storage capacity.
If you wonder how can this feature be exploited when playing in a location with no network connection, just note that the machine hosts two SIM card slots (one reserved for data traffic and the second one for normal voice, allowing phone calls also during a performance thanks to the integrated handsfree speaker), and moreover it incorporates a special "preload" mode. The user just needs to use a simple procedure to download the required sequence of patches beforehand, in a place where a network connection is available, and these will be stored in the internal volatile memory, to be automatically recalled by the KORK before each new song, each time all keys are released, or whenever it detects a key change (therefore a song change).
As explained by the project leader, dr. Oohmee Godznezz, this is just one of many innovative features based on the registered MIDI Network Transfer technology (MINT).
Another revolutionary feature is Korg Online Organized Licks (KOOL):
this system allows to enriching the player's performance in real-time by exploiting what other users are playing in the very same moment anywhere else in the world. One just needs to set the BPM tempo and the key of the musical piece, and by pressing a button the keyboard will play a musical phrase downloaded from the network, straight from the performance of some other user. A musical style selector helps to ensure that the piece of music blends nicely with the performance: for the time being the designers have implemented ten musical genres among the most popular ones, to be expanded in the future: Pop, Rock, Jazz, Gospel, Appalachian, Taiko, Yuka, Min'yo, Heikyoku, Umui.
The very same technology provides many other possibilities, such as the KOrg KOrrector (KOKO), which allows to fix user playing mistakes such as hitting the wrong key: when the machine detects that the user pressed the key for a note not belonging to the key of the musical piece, or not exactly on the beat, it will automatically fix it, resulting in a better performance. As an example, if you set a piece to be in C major key and press an F sharp, the keyboard will actually play a G (sometimes, more rarely, an F).
There's even more: the keyboard will store (over the network) every musical phrase which is being played, and when it later detects its first notes being played, it will complete it for us automatically, regardless of the keys the user actually hits; this is indeed a feature many players have been waiting for since a long time.
Coming to the low points, to be somewhat expected in such a kind of incorporation, we must say they are really minor: the ads on the screen are not that large, and when it comes to editing a parameter, the required waiting time before the ad ends is totally acceptable.
Booting time at startup is still somewhat large, around 23 minutes, but we have been told that this will be improved in production units, dropping for sure below 15.
Many future expansions are foreseen for KORK, as well as the possibility for users to subscribe for getting completely free unlimited software upgrades and libraries: one just needs to allow the installation of the Korg Advertisement Online System (KAOS), which
drives - at random times - short commercial jingles through the main outputs, discreetly merging with the played music.
Despite some initial reserves, we must admit this to not to be too an invasive feature, when thinking to the possibility of always having an up-to-date machine for free. For the time being the jingles are downloaded randomly from the network, but a selective system is being developed which allows matching the ad with the music being played, just to avoid situations as during the demo, when an ad for erectile dysfunction tablets played during the final section of the slow movement of a sonata by Benedetto Marcello.
Summarizing, we are very eager to get our hands on the KORK by Korg-Facebook, whose street price has not yet been announced, and we have no doubts it really is the feature-packed product all keyboard players were waiting for.
