Oria MIDI Ring Controller

23 Oct 2017 by Robin Vincent | Approximate reading time: 2 Minutes

Oria MIDI Ring Controller · Source: Oria

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Coming soon is the intriguing Oria MIDI Ring Controller. It appears to provide MIDI control over various parameters with gestures and subtle finger movements. Could this fashion statement be the performance tool you’ve been saving yourself for?

We’ve seen this sort of thing before with the Hot Hand from Source Audio and the iRing from IK Multimedia. Using accelerometer technology to control MIDI and software instruments. Is the Oria MIDI Ring controller going to offer anything we haven’t seen before? It’s certainly smaller, if not exactly discrete. They say that it works with “intuitive hand gestures”.

If we analyse the video (below) there seem to be a few possibilities. There appears to be some MPE style control when pushing forward on the keys, or rather rolling the fingers forward. That forward and back movement is mapped to filter cutoff. Then we have a bit of vibrato caused by the wobbling of the hand/fingers side to side. This also moves into pitch bending – although only on a single note, not individually like with MPE. So there seems to be a forward/back for filter and side to side for pitch.

In another, more focused video (below) it mentions Déclenchement or triggering, so you can play a bit of jazz-hands air drums.

The website is currently down and the Facebook page gives us nothing other than the videos. Hopefully, more information will start to emerge soon. I will say that it looks quite neat and potentially useful. It’s small enough not to feel ridiculous and could be something you could easily work into your playing. Would you forget you were wearing it and end up triggering and filtering stuff all over the place? Who knows.

No price or availability yet, we’ll let you know if we discover anything.