Airwave plays... Minecraft?

Jacob Durbin proves that Airwave really can play just about anything.

10 February 2026

Will it Minecraft?

A few months ago, we said that Airwave could play with anything. On our conveyor belt of "controllers", we managed to squeeze out sounds from anything; from Pianos and Seaboards, to Telepathic Instruments, telephones, and teddy bears. However, we didn’t expect anyone actually to put that claim to the test.

Meet Jacob Durbin, a multi-instrumentalist who loves getting under the hood with synths and interesting instruments to explore the limits of sound and music creation. He's decided to step away from melody with his Airwave and ask the question that we failed to — can you play Minecraft with Spatial Expression? With a bit of ingenuity and a lot of time and patience, Jacob's found the recipe to Minecraft gameplay in multiple dimentions. Watch below to see how things turned out.

“I was a little suspicious of whether this would actually be playable," says Jordan, "but it very much is.”

It's not as simple as plugging Airwave into your computer and jumping straight into gameplay. To move from soundscape shaping to sandbox worldbuilding, Jacob started by mapping Airwave's gestural control MIDI data to mouse movements and keyboard shortcuts used in the game. With the help of Airwave Control, capturing that MIDI data was easy, and later Jacob created a custom Python script to map each hand's dedicated mappings and the six Dimensions of Air to on-screen actions. The result was 12 individual movements, as well as combinations of gestures that let Jacob run, jump, place items, and cycle through his inventory in-game.

While playing Minecraft with Airwave was a far cry from what the ROLI Team had in mind during development, seeing Airwave used in unconventional and creative ways speaks to its limitless expressive capabilities, and we're glad to see Airwave enriching our creative expression in any way, whether it's in music making, performance, or mining for ores and opening doors.

Explore more from Jacob Durbin.

Discover the power of Spatial Expression with Airwave.

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