11 November 2009—Omer Yosha is a formally trained musician who plays guitar and sings. He left his home near Tel Aviv to see the world, traveling dusty paths in India and busking in the streets of London before settling in Berlin. The German capital is wide open, its energetic art and design scene spurred by a polyglot, multidisciplinary mix-and-match mind-set and cheap space.

Yosha still plays, but along the way he enrolled in a local design-studies program, dropping by chance into a seminar on human-computer interaction. Hacking electronic instruments and following a bent toward design and interactivity fired his imagination for what could be done to create interfaces. Now, backed by some basic training in electrical engineering and experiments in rapid prototyping, he’s starting to see results.

Most notable is his AirPiano, a thin black piece of flat Plexiglas and wood that Yosha plays with a wave of his hand, his sounds and rhythms echoing those of the Schöneberg neighborhood in which he lives. (To sample them, watch this video.)

 

”It’s fascinating to trigger notes in the air,” Yosha says, tones from a third-generation prototype echoing in his studio. He is now working with an electrical engineering partner to build out some new design features, and he expects to offer AirPianos for custom order after the start of the new year.