Percussa is a small music technology company based in Belgium, Europe. We are supported by IWT Vlaanderen.

We are a worldwide team of artists, designers, software and hardware engineers, with a common goal: to develop tools that help creative people, through innovations in human-computer interaction that make tasks simpler or give access to new forms of creative work. Read more about our mission here.

About the guy who started it all, Bert Schiettecatte:

I bought my first electronic musical instruments at age 15. I wanted to make electronic music. That was the time when there were no soft synths or DAWs available. You had to do everything on hardware and sequence it from a computer using MIDI. If you were lucky you had a hard disk recorder. While using my first equipment, a Korg Wavestation and Akai S2000 sampler, I became more and more interested in how these machines worked. At the same time I had an interest in programming, and was developing some code in Perl for various local web companies.

I went on to the university of Brussels to study computer science, and while developing an open source project I had a chance to do an internship in the US, where I learned about audio algorithms and software synthesizer technology. After returning home, I decided to apply to the MA/MST graduate program at CCRMA, Stanford University, to learn more about music technology and interaction design.

With the help of the Belgian-American Educational Foundation (BAEF) I managed to fund my studies and graduate there. It was a fantastic year and I learned a lot, especially from HCI legend Bill Verplank and one of the pioneers of computer music, Max Mathews. I got into designing electronics, and built a first MIDI controller, a tiny version of a laser harp, which had directional and distance sensing. We also built a wireless version.

After my return to Belgium and doing some academic research I founded Percussa, to design and build AudioCubes, a tangible interface. Read here why we created AudioCubes and why we are excited about them.

Contact us anytime at cubes@percussa.com or use our online contact form, and thank you for visiting our website!