Isaac Jack and Jeremy Buckley don’t look like your typical CEOs. At 24 years old, the Australian-based co-founders of Audima Labs are more beach-casual than business-casual, with white T-shirts, permanent chin stubble, and stubbies – for the non-antipodean reader, that’s a pair of shorts. Yet in just a couple of years

Isaac Jack and Jeremy Buckley don’t look like your typical CEOs. At 24 years old, the Australian-based co-founders of Audima Labs are more beach-casual than business-casual, with white T-shirts, permanent chin stubble, and stubbies – for the non-antipodean reader, that’s a pair of shorts. Yet in just a couple of years they’ve managed to get a toehold in the ultra-competitive world of music hardware, delivering something downright exciting in the process. It’s called Sway. Its purpose? “To allow artists to crack into something new,” states Buckley. The Audima Sway on the MusicTech Cover. Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech Offering music-focused motion tracking for note triggering and modulation control, it brings theremin-style magic to the world of MIDI. No keyboard, no fretboard, just a simple wave of the hand and you can conjure a wall of sound out of your favourite soft-synth. At a glance, Sway looks like any old controller: there are some silicon pads, a few click buttons, a handful of pan knobs, and a small LED panel. The first clue that this isn’t a run-of-the-mill controller is the 16 small black oblongs spaced along the length of the front panel. These are Time-of-Flight sensors, and they emit a pulse of infrared light to measure distance. Together, they track the X-Y position of a hand with pinpoint accuracy and super-low latency, gathering positional data that can then be translated into MIDI, and finally into the synth stabs and filter sweeps you’ll hear in Sway’s promotional videos. Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech Sway further moves beyond the novelty of hand-waving by breaking the trackable area into a musical grid. You can populate up to 12 note regions with scales, chords, sample triggers – you name it. And you can play it all without ever touching the controller itself. Little surprise then that it’s already become a hot commodity, with mega DJ Illenium taking the stage at the Las Vegas Sphere armed with two Sway units for his 2026 nine-date residency. “We think [its appeal] is very broad,” Buckley says. “But where Sway really excels is in the performance space.” “‘Gimmick.’ That was probably the biggest comment. When you challenge the norm, you’re always going to have that pushback” Sway With Me When I get my hands on Sway, it quickly becomes clear what Buckley is getting at: this is a controller that not only requires you to move, but encourages theatricality. Playing a melody becomes a series of slaps, jabs and sweeps. Modulating an effect feels like you’re having an intimate moment with a ghost. And all of this is accompanied by neon LED hues that shift and pulse in response to your every move. “Funnily enough,” says Buckley, “it’s how we naturally move to music, whether you’re in the car listening to your favourite song or you’re DJing, these hand movements translate so perfectly into music. So, to move it from being the reaction to music to then have these movements actually create the music was something that just made sense to us.” The path to Sway began while both Jack and Buckley were studying engineering together in Gold Coast, Queensland – where Audima Labs is now based. “I was messing around with some ultrasonic sound sensors for measuring distance,” says Buckley. “Building little robots that would navigate around the room.” Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech Both fans of electronic music, and with Buckley having learned piano from a young age, it was a matter of time before they found a connection between their engineering studies and music. “We’d been watching a lot of DJs,” Buckley recalls. “We were noticing how stagnant the DJ actually was on stage – very anti-social body behaviour. I guess that was the first step in this journey.” Not everyone would have made the leap from critiquing shoegazing DJs to building your own gestural MIDI controller, but once the idea was out there the duo lost no time getting stuck in. “Jeremy came to me with the idea, and we just started building,” Jack recalls. “First, linking sensors together so that one controls an effect on the X-axis, and then another effect on the Y-axis. Once we got those working together, we started expanding out to four, to eight, and then we started doing XY tracking at the same time.” Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech Eventually, Jack and Buckley went up to 20 onboard sensors before whittling this back to the current 16. Many of those early prototypes are chronicled on social media – cardboard frames, Arduino microcontrollers, tangled wires, and enthusiasm abound. Those online posts might make it look easy, but the pair are frank about the challenge of getting an independent venture like this off the ground. “Engineering itself is one humongous struggle,” remarks Buckley. “But you’re also building something that hasn’t been validated in the market, and you don’t even know if people are gonna buy it. So, you’re fronting up a lot of cash to get this vision out there.” By the time early iterations of Sway were seen in public, Jack and Buckley had already been working on the controller for 18 months. Even then, to make the jump from DIY project to shippable product required far more investment than the pair could self-finance. “We were noticing how stagnant the DJ actually was on stage – very anti-social body behaviour. I guess that was the first step in this journey” Jump The Shark An initial boost came when their pair managed to get themselves on the Australian version of the reality TV show Shark Tank, where they pitched their prototype and managed to secure $50,000 AUD in funding. When that still wasn’t enough to move to full scale production, Jack and Buckley turned to crowdfunding platform Indiegogo, launching a social media campaign framing Sway as the future of music making. The campaign caught fire, raising over $200,000 AUD to support the Sway’s initial launch of 300 units. Crowdfunding was a game changer, but also introduced its own challenges. In comparison to an established company that might experiment, fail, revise, and refine with the benefit of privacy, Jack and Buckley had to perfect Sway in full view of a community renowned for having strong opinions. “Early on, when we had our prototypes, we experienced a lot of rejection from the market through social media,” Buckley recalls. Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech “‘Gimmick,’” interjects Jack. “That was probably the biggest comment. I think when you create something that challenges the norm, you’re always going to have that pushback.” Despite taking their lumps online, both believe that putting early versions of Sway out for critique was ultimately a net positive. “We were trying to get feedback,” explains Buckley. “Saying ‘hey, what do you think of this feature? Is this usable in your workflow?’ As we took that feedback on board, we then reached out to a bunch of local producers and musicians where we live and ran a bunch of sessions in person using prototypes. That was pretty valuable at that early stage.” Throughout the process, one of the guiding lights for Sway has been its “user-friendly” design, says Buckley. The fruits of that focus are perhaps most evident in the accompanying desktop application that allows for quick customisation of the controller to fit different workflows. Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech You can change the layout of Sway’s motion-tracked grid, set melodic scales for note triggers, and configure your LED colour palette. The controller also supports six performance gestures that add MIDI expression to triggered notes – including Pulse, a lifting gesture that adds modulation on top of a note or chord; Press, a downward movement to add note dynamics; and Strike, which ties the speed of your hand movements to note velocity. All of these can be turned on or off, combined, and saved to presets. Presets themselves can be hot-swapped with a button press or even automated via MIDI program change messages sent out from your DAW. “We all love personalising and customising our gadgets,” notes Buckley. “That was something that customers really requested early on. Sway is used in such a variety of setups: with DJ software, DAWs, even standalone setups. So things like mapping the playable area was one of the big things, and we could only make that possible with the desktop app.” “The Sway’s purpose is to allow artists to crack into something new” Music In Motion That plug-and-play approach is essential for widespread adoption. Intrepid music-makers have been hacking motion capture devices for quite some time now. DIY projects using the Xbox Kinect, Leap, its successor Ultraleap, and even humble web cameras have yielded fascinating experiments, but very few consumer products. In fact, with many of those devices now discontinued and hard to acquire, Audima Labs stands almost alone in its use of motion capture for music. Their nearest competitor in this space comes from the ROLI Airwave, but in Buckley’s view the two largely adopt different design paradigms. “I would say the ROLI Airwave is designed to be a peripheral,” Buckley offers. “It works alongside other products. Here, we wanted motion control to be the entire interface. You can create music with Sway alone. I also think Airwave has taken a more educational route; learning to play the piano, and that side of things.” “It’s restricted on the performance side of things,” adds Jack. “There’s the camera pointing down, which hides what you’re doing. So [Sway] has always been about the visual aspect of performing and doing the whole thing in one unit.” Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech There’s clearly demand for Sway. To date, the controller has been released in batches every six months; customers can reserve a unit with a $25 AUD deposit, and each drop has sold out. “For the crowdfunding launch, we did roughly 300 units,” says Jack. “We followed up with batch two, which was around 500 units, and then batch three was 1,200 units. So roughly doubling in growth each time. We’re still in the middle of batch four.” Incremental releases might seem like a savvy strategy to increase hype but, in truth, it stems from the practicalities of handling manufacturing and global distribution as a small startup. “It’s a bit of a stepping stone, and probably out of the ordinary for most companies,” says Jack. “It’s the only way we can grow organically and continue providing support for customers. There are a lot of companies that go out of business, and then there’s a bunch of customers without any user support. That’s something we do not want to do at all – so this gives us the free run to take on orders, manufacture, and deliver.” In a music industry where independent manufacturers often wither on the vine or get picked up by large conglomerates, it’s inspiring to know you can still bootstrap a new controller into existence with a good idea, elbow grease, and a healthy dose of grassroots support. Do they have any advice for those thinking of following Audima Lab’s example? “Expect a lot of adversity,” quips Buckley. “It’s something you gotta overcome: we pushed through, and were able to develop something pretty beautiful.” Audima Labs’ fourth batch of the Sway is currently open for pre-order. Words: Clovis McEvoy Photography: Simon Vinall The post “When you challenge the norm, you’re always going to have pushback”: Audima Labs’ Sway controller is an indie innovation appeared first on MusicTech.