Andrew Staniland was frustrated with the currently available musical options when performing for a live audience. He enlisted Scott Stevenson to help develop the next generation of musical instrument. Making electronic music for an audience lost some impact because operating a computer wasn’t a dynamic action that showed the audience cause and effect from motion to music. Andrew’s idea was to make the instrument something that was physically manipulated instead of a piece of equipment like an amp or a pedal.
Andrew and Scott are now running a Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund their first run of production units for Mune: A new kind of electric instrument. Their goals during the design and development phases of the product were ease of use and dynamic motion. Inspiration came from acoustic instruments but piano, synthesizers, drums and DJ music can also be made with the Mune.
Mune’s app is called Symphony, and allows users to take the instrument with the preloaded features or reassign buttons and sounds to better match the individual user. The software is open source and the Mune itself is wireless and can run via Bluetooth up to 50 feet away from the sound source. Eighty four separate LED lights also help to bring more visual excitement to a musical performance.
It’s awesome to see projects like this where a user is unhappy with the current state of their industry and enlists an engineer to create something totally new. There’s a very interesting gallery of the Mune’s development from a rough proof of concept up through this current production prototype. The campaign page hits all of the engineering development pieces that I want to see: A thorough discussion of the limitations of current technology, an outline of the requirements that the team tried to design into the product, and finally the revelation of current and future states of the new product. Mune has a long way to meet its crowdfunding goal of $100,000 Canadian, and the funding period runs until September 24. If successful units are expected to ship in September, 2017.