So this is it, 20 months of intensive development from a concept, nine months of pure R&D and eleven months of tweaking, field testing, alpha testing, long hours, little sleep, scant holidays and surviving largely on will-power alone. When several people with different skills devote themselves to one goal, we can have results.

Last month saw our first visit to the largest international fair for the world of music. With the smallest stand, and the newest product (we finished the prototype the night before the flight), we would have been justified to be a little nervous.

We have been lucky to win UK Trade & Investment’s “Exporting for Growth” award, beating 70 other businesses from around the South West of England. What this means for us is focused support on understanding international markets.

Potentially this will make the process of getting your hands on an AlphaSphere, that much more straightforward and could see AlphaSpheres in shops before too long.

After an intensive R&D period spanning almost nine months, we can reveal that we are working towards a soft-launch this summer...

We chose to implement Open Sound Control in the AlphaSphere because of its advantages as a communication protocol for music systems. Often abbreviated to OSC, it is a protocol for computers, sound synthesisers, and other multimedia devices which allows them to share realtime data over a network. The OSC specification was first published in 1997 at CNMAT on the grounds that it would be an alternative, and eventually a successor, to the industry-standard MIDI protocol, which in today’s standards is slow, limited, and inconvenient for complex setups.

In September 2010, we were awarded seed-funding by iShed’s Media Sandbox to research smart materials and to produce a prototype AlphaSphere. The emphasis of this research and development period was to ascertain the viability of using smart materials to produce a novel system for triggering sound. The material we chose to use was effective – it is tactile and can send a signal corresponding to pressure.