Novalia has collaborated with DJ Qbert in order to churn out what are deemed to be the first interactive DJ Decks in an album cover in the whole world, and assuming this particular idea catches on in the long run, this is definitely going to be a historical moment. QBert’s Kickstarter funded Extraterrestria album will boast of a set of working Bluetooth MIDI decks accompanied by controls, where these will hook up to iOS and OS X. Whenever one touches the paper that is connected to the Algoriddim DJAY app, the user will then gain the ability to scratch, mix and fade any songs that have been loaded into the software, now how about that for creativity?
It will arrive complete with a couple of decks, a cross fader and an array of SFX buttons that have been carefully and beautifully printed onto paper via printed electronics and artwork which were thought up of by Morning Breath for QBert. These decks hold the very special promise of demonstrating what kind of future possibilities we could be looking at when it comes to interconnectivity between the physical and digital in a manner which is able to enhance user experience.
Novalia intends to make for sale an initial limited release of a MIDI piano keyboard, 4 x 7 array and drum pad, where all of them will play nice with the Apple MIDI protocol. Just to get a better idea on what printed MIDI is all about, it happens to be a convergence of printed capacitive touch, MIDI processing and Bluetooth Smart. In other words, printed MIDI has the ability to potentially transform any surface into a MIDI controller, and it does not matter whether said surface is flat or curved. The printed MIDI that Novalia uses would play nice with the new Apple MIDI Bluetooth protocol, where that will work only on OS X Yosemite and iOS 8 for the moment.