Mike Butera has gone on some intriguing journeys, connecting music performance passions, philosophy and sound studies, and tech in creating new musical instruments for regular people to get into music. He shares his path to launching Artiphon after years in academic circles, ways he learned how to market new devices and thrive with Kickstarter, and how the adventure is going so far as they get ready to release the Chorda in late 2023.

Guest: Dr. Mike Butera, Founder & CEO, Artiphon

Dr. Mike Butera is the founder & CEO of Artiphon, a music tech company designing smart instruments that anyone can play. Mike received his Ph.D. in Sound Studies from Virginia Tech and was a professor of Sociology and Philosophy for 6 years. Prior to founding Artiphon, Mike was a consumer electronics product designer, a touring musician, and a public speaker in music & technology. 

What are you most passionate about with your current work? : Inspiring people to be musical for just a minute every day!

Links:

• https://artiphon.com
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikebutera/
• https://www.facebook.com/Artiphon

This show is about people who innovate in all walks

of life. And you have innovated, or have touched many walks of

life so far, and connected them together, which I find

fascinating. Mike, can you start us out with what you're doing

now, which your main adventure is now.

So I am currently and have been for a while

running Artifon. Artifon is a music technology company. Our

goal really is to reimagine musical instruments as friendly,

fun, casual consumer devices, the kind of smart home

revolution that we've seen in a lot of other areas we want to

apply to music. And that's not really the point. The point is,

we think a lot more people can have fun playing music, then

than have before when musical instruments were designed for

pros primarily. And so we want to design instruments for

everyone else. So what I'm doing is I'm running the company, I'm

leading product design. I, I'm trying to figure out what's next

in the world of getting more people to be creative. And and

so yeah, we are currently launching a new product that

we're really excited about called Chorda. And we can talk

about that. But yeah, it's our latest smart instrument. And

we're currently going into manufacturing on that.

Great, and I want to come back to the

Kickstarters. I want to come back to the why these. But why

drag you backwards progressively? Why did you feel

this company needed to be started?

So the year was 2010. I had just gotten my PhD

in sound studies. I was at Virginia Tech. And I moved back

to Nashville. And I was a professor of sociology and

philosophy, and really enjoying that.

Already, we've got a woven together journey here,

right.

Yeah, yeah

Sound studies and philosophy and sociology.

Yeah, for me, it was it was this continuum of

thinking through the ways that people want to make the world

sound certain ways, which changes. By the second, my

dissertation research was around phenomenology, which is kind of

this study of not just perception, but your approach to

the world, how you know how the world presents itself to you how

you respond to it interacting with the world, basically. And I

found that with sound, we have all these different ways of

controlling our acoustic spaces. We have doors and windows, we

have headphones, we can put on a record, we can walk away. And a

lot of those are mitigation strategies, you know, adding

sounds or masking sounds, to kind of fix your acoustic space.

And so I started thinking about what were the creative aspects

of that? How could we get people to change the way the world

sounds in a creative way, rather than in this more defensive, you

know, personal space kind of way. And as a lifelong musician,

I thought, well, musical instruments are definitely where

I'm going to start with that. But then I just basically

thought, well, instruments, so these professional devices that

we expect everyone else to play well,

with a training process too, right? With a

training process that is socialized, that is structural,

that is an economic device for for funding the trainer. and is

and is normalized, or my favorite things that I've done

is I was in at the Museum of Art in New York. And they have an

entire kind of progression of musical instruments exhibit,

which they also have online. So you can sort of see that these

all gestated for a bit and then they locked.

Yeah, yeah. And that's culture

Unlock business. It's also the economics, right?

So that so that when you start having the sheet music, it has

to go with an instrument that sounds a certain way that is

part of an orchestration, that is part of a normalization, and

you're kind of looking to break that.

Yeah, even just the number of notes that you're

expected to play. And yeah, I do want to think about, you know,

the same kinds of revolutions we've seen from technology in

other media forms, photography, video writing, you know, all

these forms of human expression that are very fundamental. But

now most people don't, they're not intimidated by taking a

picture. They might not think it's the best picture on the

world, and they don't care. They don't say, I shouldn't have done

that, or I'm bad at that. They just take another picture. And

that's not the conversation with music. It hasn't been for over

100 years. And we can talk about the role that copyright law has

played in that, that record labels and the distribution of

music scarcity was was a real problem 150 years ago. But now,

there is this opportunity to think about redesigning music as

something that is inherently interactive, and just not as

serious or, you know, intimidating or problematic as,

as people tend to think it is, it can be really casual. So that

really was the foundation for the company. I mentioned, I was

teaching at the time, I had a friend who had been in consumer

technology. So I was in Nashville, and there was this

company there. And he left and he, we were chatting, and he

said, Hey, we should start a product design firm. And at the

time, I, you know, that hadn't been on my radar, I was going to

be a tenured professor, that was the whole goal. And but I said

yes, and I didn't take the tenure track job. And we started

a product design firm that designed smart speakers and more

tech and culture kind of things for other companies that did

well, at, you know, Costco, and Target, places like that.

So you were

That taught me a lot.

I was gonna say that you were bringing though I

was gonna say your weaponizing your academic studies. . . that

you know, how people think, and how people buy and how people

experience products, you'd been studying and teaching and

embedding in other people's lives, where you then built your

superpowers to operationalize how people think and actually

design for,

like your problematization here, because

as a sociologist, you know, we're supposed to be well, at

least traditionally rather passive. Now, that's always, you

know.

Observent only right? Yeah, right, not

polluting the research stream.

That's been critiqued enough that it doesn't

exist. But, you know, general goal is, don't actively do that.

But of course, the, you know, cultural revolutions of the

past, you know, 100 years, have seen more active forms of social

engagement. And so I really like your framing of this, because I

do feel like I'm taking a lot of the critical theory that I

learned and taught, and looking at those structures of power and

influence and cultural capital, for instance, and saying,

there's, there's a different way to do this. I don't think it's

just democratization from a political kind of standpoint,

but I do think it is a form of empowerment, and even,

hopefully, a psychological shift that people can have in their

own identities as creative, expressive people, that you went

back to the, you know, origins of a lot of musical instruments.

Usually, they use the best technologies of their day, they

were some of the most advanced tech tools of the time. And

yeah, they get frozen because we need to formalize things and,

you know, create institutions around them and all that, but

when they're being invented, they're normally very cutting

edge. And this just felt like another moment in history where

we could really look at digital tech in a new way. Because for

decades now, digital music production has allowed people to

make any sound they want to, you know, keyboards in the 80s

digital recording studios in the 90s and onward. Laptops, you

know, for the past 20 some years. But the interface, the UI

tends to be very pro focused. And this was another insight at

the sort of founding moment for artifact was looking at all

these amazing, you know, new technologies, but seeing how

they're really just designed For pros, the high learning curve on

the instrument side, but also on the recording side. And that

moment was around 2010, the iPad was released, and GarageBand hit

the iPad. And that was a lightbulb for me of saying,

okay, all these sounds are available to anyone, this is

going to change the way kids especially think about what

they're capable of with music. Because now there's this free

app on their iPad, or five bucks at the time, that that they

could go in and record beats and be like, I made this beat. And

that's cool. And that might, that might be enough to get them

to feel like they're a creative person. I wanted to focus on the

interface, the screen wasn't enough, you know, having to

stare at a screen and never be able to close your eyes when you

play and not get that muscle memory. I wanted to bring that

back into music creation and bring in all the new benefits of

digital recording and everything like that.

Very cool. And we'll come back to this because

then part of it is there is a retail marketplace and

expectations and school focus and all this stuff for a sale. I

want to hear more about how you've dealt with that. But you

Mike, you started out commenting also that as a musician, so you

as a musician, do play create.

I do. I so I started on violin, when I was

eight, I came home and asked if I could play violin because I

saw the orchestra at school and really liked it. I for the first

six years of lessons, I never improvised. It was just sheet

music. And, and it was often music that I had never heard. I

only saw the notes on the page. And my teacher would say whether

I was playing it correctly or not. But I actually didn't have

the original recordings to even play along with, which was an

interesting way to learn.

Yeah, this was where where did you grow up?

I grew up in Pennsylvania. So just a, you

know, normal kind of grew up in, in a neighborhood worked on the

farm right next to the neighborhood grew up in the

family flower shop. So pretty classic.

Were your parents creative at all? Or did they do

music?

So my dad's a floral designer, so very

creative in that sort of visual material field. And my mom is

She's a painter, and has been a teacher and things so very

inspiring. But not musical in particuclar.

So the theme might be it can be non traditional was

there from the beginning?

Yes.

wWat did they think that that Mike was going

to be?

They, they never prefigured that for me. There

was there was never that like Doctor lawyer. Kind of

expectation.

Get a good degree and get a good professional

field and life will be your oyster.

Yeah, yeah. We liked oysters. We just didn't

have that many. And. And so when I said that I wanted to go to

college for music and music performance in particular and

violin. They were like, great. And they supported me even

though that is not a career that offers many, you know, many

opportunities for professional violinist.

So what did you think it was going to do? I'm

always fascinated it now then, that when people make a college

decision, they're buying a black box, and oftentimes don't say,

and then when I'm done with that, I see I would do x. So if

it wasn't about violin for me, I actually wanted

to I actually tried to go for guitar initially. But there were

too many guitars and they had room for a violinist. So with

that, but for me, it was just music. It was is there a way I

moved to Nashville? Is there a way to do music as a career? And

at the time, I really didn't know what that could mean other

than being a band and get signed to do the normal thing you

imagine? Yeah. Yeah. And I enjoy I did some of that. And I've

done the, you know, the band stuff, the solo stuff, the

studio recording engineer. I love that whole world. But it

was also at this moment. And this is 20 some years ago now,

when that digital shift was happening pretty profoundly when

I I started in studios, we were recording to tape and I loved I

mean, fully analog signal paths, amazing sound like, I still love

it is a million dollar studio. And, and at the same time that

studio had a little room that had a Pro Tools rig with a

computer. And they were all these people making totally new

sounds. And they're in this little room and then they got a

laptop, and they did it back in their apartments. So I was

seeing that happen at that moment. And that totally

influenced me toward this. So. So anyway, I didn't know where

it would go. I quickly, you know, fell in love with studios

and then found philosophy and sociology, I actually got a

triple major, how they see that.

Everything seems like a somewhat normal journey

until you look and go way way. Wait, how did Mike do that?

Because first of all, for most people, they'd have no idea that

you can create multiple blended, the you don't have to be in a

single journey path. And in fact, most universities have a

structure your own degree journey possible that they don't

tell anyone about how can you imagine if half your students

were doing that? So how did you So you did three separate

degrees? And what drove you to think this was sane? Well,

if we go back and nerd out just prior for some

reason, when I was in sixth grade, I came home and said I

wanted to be homeschooled. And I was doing well in school, I had

friends like it was working out. But I met someone who was in

homeschooling and they were like, Yeah, you get to customize

all your work. And you get to, you know, go down these paths.

And it's Yeah, I thought, Well, this sounds really interesting.

And it took a little convince my parents, but we did. And it

ended up that the second half of my you know, formative education

years, I was, you know, learning at home and able to build all of

these different course classes, you know, studies in areas that

you wouldn't normally get to. And so I kind of broke out of

that normal, you know, middle of high school mode. So when I went

to college, I was able to get in the honors program actually

didn't have the the SAT score for it. Standardized testing

wasn't one of my strong points. But I went into the office, and

I said, Hey, I really, yeah, I really want to do this. Yeah.

And it worked. We got in a conversation. I said, I said

what I was passionate about. And they said, well, we'll give you

a semester, we'll see you know, this, we'll see if this works

out. And it worked out. And And then luckily, that program gave

me kind of free rein to piece together these different fields,

you had to justify why. So like one of my majors was music

production. And I actually studied music, composition,

performance, business, you know, recording, distribution, like

all these different aspects . . .

It helps you're at Belmont because all those were

available at Belmont.

Exactly. Yeah. And yeah, it's very unique

Did you go right to grad school, or did you have

opportunity. And similar with philosophy and sociology, the

two there was a lot of overlap and critical theory and things

any sidebars?

but, but I was able to kind of carve out those paths. And then

I had about a year that I was saving up for it. I

when I got to grad school at Virginia Tech,

was working at some restaurants and things in Nashville and

doing music and you know, that kind of stuff. But it was all in

preparation to go to grad school.

But sometimes it's a good buffer or baking point or

settling out or because you then went right from masters to

doctorate, which is a bit of a journey. Know why Yeah. Why grad

school? Why is it the fact that you had this lovely blended

thing that would thrive in grad school or that you had gotten

distracted?

I hadn't found sound studies yet. I went to

grad school because I thought I wanted to be a social theory

professor. And that could be in a philosophy or sociology

department. But I knew I wanted to do that. I was especially

studying technology and social networks at the time. So

yes, and this was 2008 ish.

I started grad school in '07. So I finished up

undergrad and in '05 and then in December '05 and then yeah, just

over a year. started grad school, the . . . . So I went to

Virginia Tech . . . The master's program in philosophy

there was analytic compared to Continental, just two branches

of philosophy. Very kind of hardcore logic focused, not the

kind of philosophy where you just talk about what's on your

mind and and see if you can come up with new ideas. That was

primarily my style. So I was suddenly in this rigorous sort

of engineering driven culture at VT, which I learned a ton. I

also found sound studies. In the first year, while I was there, I

didn't know it existed, it was a nascent field at the time. And I

read a mention of it in a book on cyber culture studies, that

sound had been under explored in this field. And I was like, oh,

and it just all the lights came on. And you know, all these

different passions kind of magnetize together. So I, I

joined a Ph. D. program at Virginia Tech, that didn't quite

exist yet. It hadn't been finalized with the state. It

was, it was the first truly interdisciplinary PhD in the

country. And it was between philosophy, history, sociology,

political theory, things like that. So I was the first

student, PhD student in this program. And I was part of

getting it, you know, I was in those meetings with the

regulators or whatever, in academia, to figure out what it

meant. And therefore, it was a blank slate. And I said, I want

to do sound studies. And they're like, great, go for it. And so I

was able to create this whole PhD program around this new

field and travel around the world and go to all these

conferences and be a part of the new journals that were coming

out. And it was, it was amazing. So anyway, I think the theme

academically was, I, I never, I was never interested in sort of

finding the boxes to check off or, you know, put on the shelf

or whatever. I was always looking for ways to kind of

integrate different fields together and find something new.

So let's get back to the more current future. And

so you've got a past, a build it yourself for yourself, blending,

exploring, poking some things in the eye that are, are

traditional. And so then you went you created was it assault,

where you were then building company building lots of

different things?

Yeah.

What bridged you from we're helping, consulting,

building launching consumer products to I want to start a

company, and then what led into the first instrument? And, and

why Kickstarter, so if we could make that journey conversation.

So this was. . . Yeah, back to 2010 that that

sort of pivotal moment. One of the things was, it worked, it

was working, the consulting was doing well, I was able to come

up with ideas like for these smart home speakers that would

all connect with each other work with industrial designers,

mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, and so on. Go to

China go to the factory oversee production and then see it you

know, actually do well in the market. And so this was all menopause

menopause a second because you explained a lot of

your gestation Did you have any tech skills at this stage? Did

you learn things yourself? Or did so? What was that tech

component and when the some people build things and do

things and they've been taking apart their parents toasters,

since they were five, or they've been coding forever, or they've

been doing robot design and building so so I'm not hearing a

building story, this is this part of the superpowers of your

partner is this stuff that you learned or trusted other people

with?

So I was always yes, I was always taking things

apart and and, you know, as a kid and onward, when I got into

studio tech in college, I was repairing gear building tube,

you know, gear and whatever. So I electrically you know,

familiar but Not an electrical engineer. A lot of training in

design happened from my dad from floral design, you know, more

aesthetically, I would say. But then I learned a lot of that

hands on during the consulting phase, you know, how consumer

tech was actually built? Coding, I always dabbled, but, you know,

some people, most people are so much better at that than I am.

So I've always been able to translate the kind of design

intent and understand the architecture of it, but that

was, that was never my thing. So yes, a lot of trust, a lot of

collaboration with people. And, and I felt like I was, I was

discovering that my role was this hub or a translator,

between culture and product design, ways of thinking, and in

the weeds, engineering and just, you know, always keeping that

that strand connected. Because so many products are either, you

know, impossible to build, or possible to build and no one

wants them and

are so expensive to build that no one wants it at

that price point, right. So that in many ways, specialty music

instruments, I mean, the ones that I'm aware of what Chapman

stick and other things where you kind of go so expensive to build

and creating customized and not met as mass products. That's

been on my wish list

for a while and let's let's tag a corner this

conversation in terms of with instruments, what, what are the

cultural references or familiarity that people need?

You know, Chapman stick is a good example. cool technology,

you can make all kinds of sound with it. People get virtuosic in

amazing ways with it.

So complicated. It play. Yes. Yeah.

I mean, it's just like a theory bomb. Music Theory

of like,

I can to pause everybody, because I would never

have known a Chapman stick other than I was at a small concert,

and someone was playing it. And I was so blown away by watching

total virtuosity. So it's kind of like, a unstructured guitar

had a baby with a bass. But it's sort of two directions. Yeah,

it's like a harp hanging from a bait. So it was very much a

cultural mashup. And but, uh, simply, the virtuosity was like

watching a phenomenal heart play, or were you just watching?

Oh, my gosh, but I went to go price one. I'm like, Oh, my

gosh, that is such an expensive instrument. And it is sort of

art. It's almost the opposite of what you guys have been building.

Right? Well, and so then get back to that. So why,

why build a new type of musical instrument? was the question I

was asking myself when I got up the courage to say, Yeah, I want

to start my own company. Yeah, I want to, I want to build a new

thing. I mentioned, the user interface challenge of all these

apps were out there. But you don't want to just touch a

screen, you want something in your hands? Well, that's great.

What should that thing be. And we could have designed a very

specific instrument, a singular instrument, like most instance,

instruments, or singular, you, it's intended to be played one

way you learn how to play it that way, and then you're good

at it. My goal was to create a plural instrument, an

instrument, we call it a multi instrument, something that you

could actually pick up and play in all these different ways. And

versatility was one of the goals. Because why not digital,

lets you do that. We can build form factors that allow for

multiple positions and gestures and playing styles. So creating

this universal musical instrument has a versatility

benefit. But there's another even more important benefit that

I was really going for, which is approachability. The theory that

I had at the time, and we're still playing this out, we're

still seeing if this is, you know going to be true in the

world. The theory is that if you multiply what a thing can do,

than any one thing that it does is less intimidating. Because

you pick it up and you say I'm gonna just gonna play some

drums. You know what, I'm going to have some fun and pick it up

and strum it like a guitar or put it down on the table and now

it's a piano. None of those things are the right way to play

it and therefore you're not playing Seeing it wrong. And so

creating this universal instrument also has the benefit

of giving more people the sense that they could just casually

approach it, see what it does enjoy that, and not compare

themselves to the best musician in the world who's so much

better at them at this one singular thing. And that's, that

really was that moment where I thought, Okay, this is going to

work, we do have a new conversation to, you know, bring

to the world of what instruments can be. And yeah, that's when we

started designing what we call the instrument one, which was

our first product.

It makes me think of Dan Shneiderman's

philosophies of creativity, technology support tools, now

I'm gonna go nerdy for a bit where it's like a metaphor as a

doorway. So you can have a low threshold or a high threshold, a

wide doorway, that you can stuff many things into it, or a tall

doorway, where you can go to extreme expertise. And I always

come to a new technology and go, is it an easy entry? Is it a

wide doorway? Or does it have extreme sophistications? Like me

trying to come in to, to Photoshop? Yeah, I know, I could

possibly start Photoshop fairly easily for about five minutes.

And then it's like, Wait, I don't like kind of grok it I'm

doing blender right now. It's it's like, immediately high

doorway, wide walls, high ceiling. But the doorway is so

harsh as you're looking to make it. So it's an easy entry. But

sophisticated uses and wide uses, you're kind of making an

infinite doorway.

That's it's a goal. One of one of the ways we do

that we call it scalable complexity. In the history of

instruments, they're based on physics, of resonance,

vibration, resonance. And therefore the material, the

size, all those aspects of it had to be pretty fixed, there

was some variables that you could add or subtract, but that

was it. And even the early days of electric and electronic

instrumentation with early synthesizers, and things, it

also pretty fixed circuits were kind of baked in, you had the

armed Martino, one of my favorite instruments, where you,

you could plug in these different they were like

speakers, but they were actually not speakers like we normally

think some of them were gongs, others were paper, others, you

know, were wood. And so the point was, when you plug in the

speaker, it's going to sound like a totally different

instrument. But it's because of the physics of it. With digital

tools, now we can actually create these adaptive devices.

And so if we get the ergonomics, right, based on simple human

forms, and averages of hand size, and all kinds of things.

So similar to say, a game controller, or remote, or all

kinds of other objects we use, we can program these devices to

respond differently based on what you want to do with them.

We can receive different gestures in ways that we make

musical, not in the same way. So if you want to strum something,

versus tap it, versus bow it, or press it, these are all

different gestures that we can program and say, well, now we're

going to put it in a sort of piano mode, or a guitar mode, or

a drum machine mode or things like that. And that's actually

one of the things that we patented, was this concept of

the multi instrument as a switchable responsive device,

rather than, you know, based on one way to play. So that that

was one of the key, you know, founding principles of what

we're doing, it's a bit hard to explain. And again, maybe, maybe

it'll be the way of the future or maybe it's a moment in

history, but it seems to be working.

So for for people trying to visualize this who are

listening to this, that the first one which was instrument

one, kind of look like a mash up a long, thin strip that had

sensors on the top that you could, that also had

accelerometers and other motion sensors, so that you could take

that same essentially bar and play it, hold it up and strum

it, move it in space. So that it wasn't just taking one of the

metaphors or affordance sets but let you take patterns that you

already knew from something else and bring it over. Yeah,

absolutely. Yeah. We, with the design of the

instrument one, it took just over four years to go from idea

into a product that we could, you know, announce to the world.

So a lot of iterations, six different prototype generations

in there a lot of a lot of different ways to look at it

initially, for instance, it had a doc for an iPhone. Because

Doc's were really cool, which made sense at the time, right?

It was great. It was great. It was it was really neat, because

it became this self contained instrument that was before

Bluetooth was really possible or you know, even just USB

connection more generally. So. So anyway, it it evolved a few

different ways. It ended up being a device, we launched it

on Kickstarter, in 2015. We didn't know what it would do,

the design of it was we ended up making it in plastic, so we

could mass manufacture it. The sensors were called force

sensing resistors, it was this, this kind of sheet of film

underneath a, an almost rubbery surface that could sense touch

and pressure velocity, you could slide on it, it was almost like

a computer trackpad. But but a rubber surface a little harder

to play than that. And, and it had these string features on it.

And we did that because in early testing, we found that a lot of

the musicians again, this was in Nashville, a lot of the

musicians were very string focused, and really wanted that

tactile feel of having, you know, muscle memory. Yeah, yeah.

This was not fret started, they wanted friends.

This is not a not a mistake. But as we talked about

Chorda it's interesting, we took off the strings for Chorda,

similar form factor kind of ukulele size bar. But Chorda has

pads and a strong mobile area. So insert one accord a both have

those things, but insert one had the string features again,

because musicians were asking for that. Insert one can do

things that stringed instruments can't do that other instruments

can't do. Every note can have its own distortion or for Broto.

You can apply effects to every little touch. If you press

harder, you know, you could bring in delay or whatever you

wanting to like amazing things. But what it didn't have was real

strings. And for those, say guitarists approaching this with

the muscle memory of strings back to physics, they wanted to

behave exactly like strings behave. And that was

problematic. It was a problem that I think is quite

interesting, and highlights this this paradigm shift between

physical and virtual instruments, virtuosic

to write I live off my business as being of not

having to think about it, and being able to create art after

years of practice.

Yeah, well, Aristotle's notion of virtue

has, you know, not quite as much to do with what we think about,

like, you know, a virtuous person is like, really good or

something, for Aristotle was more like being good at

something. And, and having the virtue of, of, you know, being

capable having the affordances matched to what you're doing.

And so, there's an interesting just to get kind of deep on that

of the virtue and virtual, that we can actually map the same

behaviors, the same affordances from the physical world into the

what we now call the virtual world, as long as people have

the virtue of being able to use it. And all that means in normal

language now is like the capability or in some cases,

just the confidence of reaching out and touching it. If you can,

strum your hand through the air. And if a guitar is under your

hand, you'll strum a guitar. But if you're in an augmented

reality environment, that can detect your hand moving through

the air, and you strum virtual strings. It's the same result.

And so you have the virtue of being able to strum the

technology is going to determine exactly how that happens, but it

might not matter what the inner workings are of it as long as

you get to intend for something to happen, and it happens in the

end. That is, you know, that's enough. And again, this is how I

tend to think about product design, like, can we design?

Tough stuff?

People will expect the haptic feedback of the

string, right? So that they there still is, then they would

like that interaction with that. I'm right now building things in

spatial audio and VR. And so really thinking about what then

that response is, and how sorry, we could go down. So holes here.

Yeah, let let me let me take you down to rabbit holes to maybe

wrap up this conversation. And because there's lots of things I

would love to talk about on this, which is, so one of the

reinforcing elements is the retail sales element of musical

instruments you came in through Kickstarter, you now have come

in with several instruments. So you also had the and I have to

look at my notes, the orba, which I've had my hands on in

play, but very much of a circular modality, really

hitting were the folks who are possibly thinking of it in terms

of beats or pads as a different modality and cheaper and

handset. And then you've taken that through Kickstarter, and

you knew, you're taking the current quarter, you had

something or have something called orbit cam, that's a video

also, I

was mentioned, the the AR stuff didn't come out of

nowhere, we've spent the past couple of years really figuring

out what's possible through the camera, as a musical interface.

So and the screen itself. So orbit cam, for instance, is an

app that you can make music directly in live video on your

screen. And there are these pads and you can play whatever sound

you want. And it will automatically get baked into the

video kind of SoundTracking your life. It works with our

hardware, but you can also use it on its own. And so yeah, what

we found is the transference of our tech, from the physical

products into apps on to a physical product you already own

your phone is all possible. And it's really just where are you?

What do you want to do? You know, what's what's fun at the

moment? And, and so yeah, we've been experimenting with AR, we

did a big launch with Snapchat last year with artists, lenses

and ways to make any song interactive, which is really

fun, using new AR tools and motion tracking, things like

that. And it's all the same thinking it's it's a lot of the

same kind of UX design that we put into our hardware

instruments that we design in the virtual space as well. So

that's that's been really fun. So

given the retail dominance, that the retail

challenges, yeah, in the current era of retail stores going away.

So they're feeling of fragility and needing to move volume. How

in the world do you sell this? A Kickstarter has been your friend

multiple times now including recently? To me, that's a

natural friction, and a quest retail scale. With retailers,

that's their ownership spot, right? How do you then get to

people and get to the learning complex and getting to people to

see this as an option other than by word of mouth, and great

Kickstarter marketing.

So Kickstarter is really this moment, just the

launch moment. It's actually a pre launch moment, it's when we

develop an instrument enough that it works, that we can

demonstrate that we can make music in our case, three times

now, we've brought that to Kickstarter and said, Hey, we

haven't manufactured this yet. We want to, we just want to make

sure you actually want it. Here's the concept. Here's how

it plays. What do you think? And all three times that's gone

quite well. And so we simultaneously we're having

conversations with retailers, not only in the musical

instrument space, but consumer electronics and and more

lifestyle retail as well, at the moment design store, for

instance, has been a great partner over the years.

Retailers increasingly don't take as many risks at launch,

they want to see that something has already worked. And so I see

the two functioning quite well together they have for us that

we've been able to go out to Kickstarter, find early adopters

who are like, Yeah, that should exist in the world. Let's help

you make it. And by doing that, we're showing that there's a

demand for this and retailers want to be more in the middle of

the adoption curve and or even past the chasm, as they say. And

so We're able to prove momentum in the market. With early

adopters, that's, it's been great for us the Kickstarter

community is awesome. And, and the other fact is we sell most

of our products direct through our website, we do sell through

Amazon as well. But, you know, going direct means we have a

relationship with our customers, we, you know, we can communicate

with them. If you buy on, if you buy or buy on Amazon right now.

And you don't go to our website and specifically sign up for

our, you know, email list, you might not know that we've just

updated the firmware and added new features or that there are

all these new songs and ways to play them, you know, we we'd

like to develop this community around our products. And it also

shows on social media, we have amazing engagement with people,

they, they make little songs, they post them, there's a whole

sort of supportive community around just this casual music

making. And that's because we have that direct relationship.

And we're not going through too many intermediaries. That said,

we we have great relationships with retailers, Guitar Center,

and you know, all kinds of people, but we're really focused

on as direct as we can get with the customer.

Mike, we have covered your highly nonlinear

journey, you're putting it together from building your own

homeschooling to building your own combination of degrees to

building your own musical instruments and companies and

products. What have we not mentioned? Is there anything you

as we wrap up, that you'd like to mention, we haven't touched

on?

I think, overall, for me, the the idea of building

a company was always secondary, it it had to be done, if I was

going to pursue this stuff, because I couldn't just couldn't

just build it all myself, I had to work with people who had all

these different skill sets, I couldn't just fund it myself, I

had to find people who wanted to build this opportunity into a

business that could actually make money someday. And, and I

didn't want to do it myself. This, it's too much fun to work

with other people. So the business the corporation is is a

body of people that is this kind of this kind of place where we

can all pursue that together. There are many other ways this

can be done, there are awesome open source projects in the

world, and you know, all kinds of things. And in music, you see

a lot of that as well. The fact that this is a business also

means that there are other realities to what it takes to

run it. And that's something I've learned so much about that

over the past decade or so. Things I didn't know, I wanted

to learn just just the total reality of doing this. And

again, I mentioned I grew up in the family flower shop. So I had

that entrepreneurial, you know, context of just how hard it is

to figure this out. It's it's exciting. But like you said,

it's it's business is also very nonlinear. Especially with the

economy going all over the place. There's really no sense

of that classic stability that you might have had decades ago

where if you build something, you know, it'll get out there

you advertise in magazines, people will read it and mail

order your stuff like it's nothing is that set, now. It's

changing by the day. So that's another exciting aspect of this.

I'm glad we mostly talked about design and culture and why. But

the vehicle that has enabled this to happen has been an

actual, an actual business. And that's, that's cool, too. It's a

very different side than I learned and taught in academia,

about how, you know, capitalism works on a grand historical

scale. This is this is how it's working at a at a product and

team level scale, which is it's it's been awesome to learn.

Excellent. So this episode will go out and be out

in the ether. Who would you like to reach back out to you?

Oh, well, anyone who wants to collaborate on this

kind of stuff. We are right now exploring a lot of different

ways to get artists content into our instruments so that our

instruments become these interactive music devices. We

already have all the tech we've we've done some of that we want

to do more. We're also very interested in multimedia, music,

and we've done some cool experiments there. We want to

expand that and see our instruments as controllers for

making music in multiple senses. So yeah, just more. I'm just

looking for collaborations that would be, that would be awesome.

And how should people best reach out to you?

Oh,

we you can go to our website we have a, you know,

general contact at Artiphon. And I'm just Mike@artifact.com if

anyone wants to reach out. Excellent.

And we'll put the various links in the show notes.

Mike, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you. That was really fun.