Airborne Instruments consists of Isak Han and Hannes Hoelzl and their more and less artificially intelligent music machines. These encompass a range of technologies from acoustic sound makers to electroacoustic, analogue and fully digital devices, many of them self built and coded.

The Airborne Instruments nUFO is the latest addition to their repertoire and won them the Creative Prototyping grant by the Senate of Berlin and the European Union. They are developing it towards a commercially available product that may well revolutionize the music world with its unique approach to gesturally play with digital instruments.

The nUFO (nontrivial/new flying object) is a new musical instrument designed for playing music with complex sound processes intuitively. Its hardware side, the Interactor, sends data from nine dimensions of motion and eight touch-sensitive pads; these data inform the sound processes running in its software side, the NTMI_app, through a neural network that entangles the data such that even the simplest movement – touching a single pad – creates a complex change in the sound, which empowers players to focus on playing by ear, removing distractions by technical concerns.