Show HN: Mune, a New Kind of Electronic Instrument | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Mune, a New Kind of Electronic Instrument

kickstarter.com

7 pointsScottAS3 comments

Here's the result of 4 years of relentless work on a hardware product. It's been an incredibly gruelling but rewarding journey bringing this from a prototype to an efficiently manufacturable product!

We really focused on building a fully-integrated platform from the ground up for today's environment. We intentionally left the metaphor of the "keyboard" and "mixer" behind, but were very inspired by the feel and expressiveness of acoustic instruments.

One of the big problems we tried to solve is that many audience members do not understand the cause-and-effect an electronic performer has with their music. (You often hear people say "They're just pushing play"). The hardware can be used in a multitude of ways, but the main position faces the audience and allows them to understand what is happening on stage.

On the business side of things, we theorize that a unique, audience facing shape will increase the "k-factor", or virality of the instrument. And we hypothesize that many electronic instruments have failed to reach ubiquity as they are often hidden on a desk with little for the audience to see.

Happy to take any questions or feedback!

How much can you tell us about how Mune integrates digital and acoustic music? Is the Mune programmable in any capacity or can it be customized to produce different sets of sounds?

The "acoustic soul" part has fed into many areas of the design. We were really interested in what made certain acoustic instruments so universally loved and ubiquitous. One of the things we have paid a lot of attention to is the expressiveness of all the controls. You can manipulate many parameters in a fine-tuned way at the same time.

We were also interested in the idea of musicians having an "emotional relationship" with their instruments. That's not something you typically see in digital gear. So we wanted the aesthetic and experience of holding it to be more intimate.

And lastly, as I said in the first comment: we really wanted a musicians cause-and-effect to be obvious to their audience.

We have an app platform called Symphony which runs on your computer. Munes also come with a license for Cycling74's fun visual programming environment which will let people create their own "apps" with little audio programming experience. These apps can easily be uploaded and shared.

In addition the onboard embedded software is open-source, so hackers can have a field day with it!

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