Roland Lamb

Roland Lamb is a designer, inventor and founder whose work expands the bandwidth of human – computer interaction.

He read Comparative Philosophy at Harvard, where he graduated summa cum laude in 2008, and completed his PhD at the Royal College of Art under Ron Arad in 2014, where he invented the Seaboard. Earlier years took him from New Hampshire to A.S. Neill’s Summerhill School in Suffolk — a pioneering free school built around learning by interest — and on to Antaiji, a Sōtō Zen monastery in western Japan.

He is the founder of ROLI, which over sixteen years he built into a UK leader in creative technology on a mission to free the music. Across the Seaboard, ROLI BLOCKS, the ROLI Piano System and Airwave — and as lead pioneer of MIDI Polyphonic Expression (MPE), now a globally adopted open standard — his work has established a new design language for expressive musical interaction. His designs are used by leading global artists across genres and generations.

He lives in London with his wife, the novelist Tahmima Anam, and their two children. They have a family band and are currently mastering The Girl from Ipanema.