Mike Butera has gone on some intriguing journeys, connecting music performance passions, philosophy and sound studies, and tech to create new musical instruments for regular people to get into music. He shares his path to launching Artiphon after years in academic circles, the 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!
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Transcript
This show is about people who innovate in all walks
Gigi Johnson:of life. And you have innovated, or have touched many walks of
Gigi Johnson:life so far, and connected them together, which I find
Gigi Johnson:fascinating. Mike, can you start us out with what you're doing
Gigi Johnson:now, which your main adventure is now.
Mike Butera:So I am currently and have been for a while
Mike Butera:running Artifon. Artifon is a music technology company. Our
Mike Butera:goal really is to reimagine musical instruments as friendly,
Mike Butera:fun, casual consumer devices, the kind of smart home
Mike Butera:revolution that we've seen in a lot of other areas we want to
Mike Butera:apply to music. And that's not really the point. The point is,
Mike Butera:we think a lot more people can have fun playing music, then
Mike Butera:than have before when musical instruments were designed for
Mike Butera:pros primarily. And so we want to design instruments for
Mike Butera:everyone else. So what I'm doing is I'm running the company, I'm
Mike Butera:leading product design. I, I'm trying to figure out what's next
Mike Butera:in the world of getting more people to be creative. And and
Mike Butera:so yeah, we are currently launching a new product that
Mike Butera:we're really excited about called Chorda. And we can talk
Mike Butera:about that. But yeah, it's our latest smart instrument. And
Mike Butera:we're currently going into manufacturing on that.
Gigi Johnson:Great, and I want to come back to the
Gigi Johnson:Kickstarters. I want to come back to the why these. But why
Gigi Johnson:drag you backwards progressively? Why did you feel
Gigi Johnson:this company needed to be started?
Mike Butera:So the year was 2010. I had just gotten my PhD
Mike Butera:in sound studies. I was at Virginia Tech. And I moved back
Mike Butera:to Nashville. And I was a professor of sociology and
Mike Butera:philosophy, and really enjoying that.
Gigi Johnson:Already, we've got a woven together journey here,
Gigi Johnson:right.
Mike Butera:Yeah, yeah
Gigi Johnson:Sound studies and philosophy and sociology.
Mike Butera:Yeah, for me, it was it was this continuum of
Mike Butera:thinking through the ways that people want to make the world
Mike Butera:sound certain ways, which changes. By the second, my
Mike Butera:dissertation research was around phenomenology, which is kind of
Mike Butera:this study of not just perception, but your approach to
Mike Butera:the world, how you know how the world presents itself to you how
Mike Butera:you respond to it interacting with the world, basically. And I
Mike Butera:found that with sound, we have all these different ways of
Mike Butera:controlling our acoustic spaces. We have doors and windows, we
Mike Butera:have headphones, we can put on a record, we can walk away. And a
Mike Butera:lot of those are mitigation strategies, you know, adding
Mike Butera:sounds or masking sounds, to kind of fix your acoustic space.
Mike Butera:And so I started thinking about what were the creative aspects
Mike Butera:of that? How could we get people to change the way the world
Mike Butera:sounds in a creative way, rather than in this more defensive, you
Mike Butera:know, personal space kind of way. And as a lifelong musician,
Mike Butera:I thought, well, musical instruments are definitely where
Mike Butera:I'm going to start with that. But then I just basically
Mike Butera:thought, well, instruments, so these professional devices that
Mike Butera:we expect everyone else to play well,
Gigi Johnson:with a training process too, right? With a
Gigi Johnson:training process that is socialized, that is structural,
Gigi Johnson:that is an economic device for for funding the trainer. and is
Gigi Johnson:and is normalized, or my favorite things that I've done
Gigi Johnson:is I was in at the Museum of Art in New York. And they have an
Gigi Johnson:entire kind of progression of musical instruments exhibit,
Gigi Johnson:which they also have online. So you can sort of see that these
Gigi Johnson:all gestated for a bit and then they locked.
Mike Butera:Yeah, yeah. And that's culture
Gigi Johnson:Unlock business. It's also the economics, right?
Gigi Johnson:So that so that when you start having the sheet music, it has
Gigi Johnson:to go with an instrument that sounds a certain way that is
Gigi Johnson:part of an orchestration, that is part of a normalization, and
Gigi Johnson:you're kind of looking to break that.
Mike Butera:Yeah, even just the number of notes that you're
Mike Butera:expected to play. And yeah, I do want to think about, you know,
Mike Butera:the same kinds of revolutions we've seen from technology in
Mike Butera:other media forms, photography, video writing, you know, all
Mike Butera:these forms of human expression that are very fundamental. But
Mike Butera:now most people don't, they're not intimidated by taking a
Mike Butera:picture. They might not think it's the best picture on the
Mike Butera:world, and they don't care. They don't say, I shouldn't have done
Mike Butera:that, or I'm bad at that. They just take another picture. And
Mike Butera:that's not the conversation with music. It hasn't been for over
Mike Butera:100 years. And we can talk about the role that copyright law has
Mike Butera:played in that, that record labels and the distribution of
Mike Butera:music scarcity was was a real problem 150 years ago. But now,
Mike Butera:there is this opportunity to think about redesigning music as
Mike Butera:something that is inherently interactive, and just not as
Mike Butera:serious or, you know, intimidating or problematic as,
Mike Butera:as people tend to think it is, it can be really casual. So that
Mike Butera:really was the foundation for the company. I mentioned, I was
Mike Butera:teaching at the time, I had a friend who had been in consumer
Mike Butera:technology. So I was in Nashville, and there was this
Mike Butera:company there. And he left and he, we were chatting, and he
Mike Butera:said, Hey, we should start a product design firm. And at the
Mike Butera:time, I, you know, that hadn't been on my radar, I was going to
Mike Butera:be a tenured professor, that was the whole goal. And but I said
Mike Butera:yes, and I didn't take the tenure track job. And we started
Mike Butera:a product design firm that designed smart speakers and more
Mike Butera:tech and culture kind of things for other companies that did
Mike Butera:well, at, you know, Costco, and Target, places like that.
Gigi Johnson:So you were
Mike Butera:That taught me a lot.
Gigi Johnson:I was gonna say that you were bringing though I
Gigi Johnson:was gonna say your weaponizing your academic studies. . . that
Gigi Johnson:you know, how people think, and how people buy and how people
Gigi Johnson:experience products, you'd been studying and teaching and
Gigi Johnson:embedding in other people's lives, where you then built your
Gigi Johnson:superpowers to operationalize how people think and actually
Gigi Johnson:design for,
Mike Butera:like your problematization here, because
Mike Butera:as a sociologist, you know, we're supposed to be well, at
Mike Butera:least traditionally rather passive. Now, that's always, you
Mike Butera:know.
Gigi Johnson:Observent only right? Yeah, right, not
Gigi Johnson:polluting the research stream.
Mike Butera:That's been critiqued enough that it doesn't
Mike Butera:exist. But, you know, general goal is, don't actively do that.
Mike Butera:But of course, the, you know, cultural revolutions of the
Mike Butera:past, you know, 100 years, have seen more active forms of social
Mike Butera:engagement. And so I really like your framing of this, because I
Mike Butera:do feel like I'm taking a lot of the critical theory that I
Mike Butera:learned and taught, and looking at those structures of power and
Mike Butera:influence and cultural capital, for instance, and saying,
Mike Butera:there's, there's a different way to do this. I don't think it's
Mike Butera:just democratization from a political kind of standpoint,
Mike Butera:but I do think it is a form of empowerment, and even,
Mike Butera:hopefully, a psychological shift that people can have in their
Mike Butera:own identities as creative, expressive people, that you went
Mike Butera:back to the, you know, origins of a lot of musical instruments.
Mike Butera:Usually, they use the best technologies of their day, they
Mike Butera:were some of the most advanced tech tools of the time. And
Mike Butera:yeah, they get frozen because we need to formalize things and,
Mike Butera:you know, create institutions around them and all that, but
Mike Butera:when they're being invented, they're normally very cutting
Mike Butera:edge. And this just felt like another moment in history where
Mike Butera:we could really look at digital tech in a new way. Because for
Mike Butera:decades now, digital music production has allowed people to
Mike Butera:make any sound they want to, you know, keyboards in the 80s
Mike Butera:digital recording studios in the 90s and onward. Laptops, you
Mike Butera:know, for the past 20 some years. But the interface, the UI
Mike Butera:tends to be very pro focused. And this was another insight at
Mike Butera:the sort of founding moment for artifact was looking at all
Mike Butera:these amazing, you know, new technologies, but seeing how
Mike Butera:they're really just designed For pros, the high learning curve on
Mike Butera:the instrument side, but also on the recording side. And that
Mike Butera:moment was around 2010, the iPad was released, and GarageBand hit
Mike Butera:the iPad. And that was a lightbulb for me of saying,
Mike Butera:okay, all these sounds are available to anyone, this is
Mike Butera:going to change the way kids especially think about what
Mike Butera:they're capable of with music. Because now there's this free
Mike Butera:app on their iPad, or five bucks at the time, that that they
Mike Butera:could go in and record beats and be like, I made this beat. And
Mike Butera:that's cool. And that might, that might be enough to get them
Mike Butera:to feel like they're a creative person. I wanted to focus on the
Mike Butera:interface, the screen wasn't enough, you know, having to
Mike Butera:stare at a screen and never be able to close your eyes when you
Mike Butera:play and not get that muscle memory. I wanted to bring that
Mike Butera:back into music creation and bring in all the new benefits of
Mike Butera:digital recording and everything like that.
Gigi Johnson:Very cool. And we'll come back to this because
Gigi Johnson:then part of it is there is a retail marketplace and
Gigi Johnson:expectations and school focus and all this stuff for a sale. I
Gigi Johnson:want to hear more about how you've dealt with that. But you
Gigi Johnson:Mike, you started out commenting also that as a musician, so you
Gigi Johnson:as a musician, do play create.
Mike Butera:I do. I so I started on violin, when I was
Mike Butera:eight, I came home and asked if I could play violin because I
Mike Butera:saw the orchestra at school and really liked it. I for the first
Mike Butera:six years of lessons, I never improvised. It was just sheet
Mike Butera:music. And, and it was often music that I had never heard. I
Mike Butera:only saw the notes on the page. And my teacher would say whether
Mike Butera:I was playing it correctly or not. But I actually didn't have
Mike Butera:the original recordings to even play along with, which was an
Mike Butera:interesting way to learn.
Gigi Johnson:Yeah, this was where where did you grow up?
Mike Butera:I grew up in Pennsylvania. So just a, you
Mike Butera:know, normal kind of grew up in, in a neighborhood worked on the
Mike Butera:farm right next to the neighborhood grew up in the
Mike Butera:family flower shop. So pretty classic.
Gigi Johnson:Were your parents creative at all? Or did they do
Gigi Johnson:music?
Mike Butera:So my dad's a floral designer, so very
Mike Butera:creative in that sort of visual material field. And my mom is
Mike Butera:She's a painter, and has been a teacher and things so very
Mike Butera:inspiring. But not musical in particuclar.
Gigi Johnson:So the theme might be it can be non traditional was
Gigi Johnson:there from the beginning?
Mike Butera:Yes.
Gigi Johnson:wWat did they think that that Mike was going
Gigi Johnson:to be?
Unknown:They, they never prefigured that for me. There
Unknown:was there was never that like Doctor lawyer. Kind of
Unknown:expectation.
Gigi Johnson:Get a good degree and get a good professional
Gigi Johnson:field and life will be your oyster.
Mike Butera:Yeah, yeah. We liked oysters. We just didn't
Mike Butera:have that many. And. And so when I said that I wanted to go to
Mike Butera:college for music and music performance in particular and
Mike Butera:violin. They were like, great. And they supported me even
Mike Butera:though that is not a career that offers many, you know, many
Mike Butera:opportunities for professional violinist.
Gigi Johnson:So what did you think it was going to do? I'm
Gigi Johnson:always fascinated it now then, that when people make a college
Gigi Johnson:decision, they're buying a black box, and oftentimes don't say,
Gigi Johnson:and then when I'm done with that, I see I would do x. So if
Mike Butera:it wasn't about violin for me, I actually wanted
Mike Butera:to I actually tried to go for guitar initially. But there were
Mike Butera:too many guitars and they had room for a violinist. So with
Mike Butera:that, but for me, it was just music. It was is there a way I
Mike Butera:moved to Nashville? Is there a way to do music as a career? And
Mike Butera:at the time, I really didn't know what that could mean other
Mike Butera:than being a band and get signed to do the normal thing you
Mike Butera:imagine? Yeah. Yeah. And I enjoy I did some of that. And I've
Mike Butera:done the, you know, the band stuff, the solo stuff, the
Mike Butera:studio recording engineer. I love that whole world. But it
Mike Butera:was also at this moment. And this is 20 some years ago now,
Mike Butera:when that digital shift was happening pretty profoundly when
Mike Butera:I I started in studios, we were recording to tape and I loved I
Mike Butera:mean, fully analog signal paths, amazing sound like, I still love
Mike Butera:it is a million dollar studio. And, and at the same time that
Mike Butera:studio had a little room that had a Pro Tools rig with a
Mike Butera:computer. And they were all these people making totally new
Mike Butera:sounds. And they're in this little room and then they got a
Mike Butera:laptop, and they did it back in their apartments. So I was
Mike Butera:seeing that happen at that moment. And that totally
Mike Butera:influenced me toward this. So. So anyway, I didn't know where
Mike Butera:it would go. I quickly, you know, fell in love with studios
Mike Butera:and then found philosophy and sociology, I actually got a
Mike Butera:triple major, how they see that.
Gigi Johnson:Everything seems like a somewhat normal journey
Gigi Johnson:until you look and go way way. Wait, how did Mike do that?
Gigi Johnson:Because first of all, for most people, they'd have no idea that
Gigi Johnson:you can create multiple blended, the you don't have to be in a
Gigi Johnson:single journey path. And in fact, most universities have a
Gigi Johnson:structure your own degree journey possible that they don't
Gigi Johnson:tell anyone about how can you imagine if half your students
Gigi Johnson:were doing that? So how did you So you did three separate
Gigi Johnson:degrees? And what drove you to think this was sane? Well,
Mike Butera:if we go back and nerd out just prior for some
Mike Butera:reason, when I was in sixth grade, I came home and said I
Mike Butera:wanted to be homeschooled. And I was doing well in school, I had
Mike Butera:friends like it was working out. But I met someone who was in
Mike Butera:homeschooling and they were like, Yeah, you get to customize
Mike Butera:all your work. And you get to, you know, go down these paths.
Mike Butera:And it's Yeah, I thought, Well, this sounds really interesting.
Mike Butera:And it took a little convince my parents, but we did. And it
Mike Butera:ended up that the second half of my you know, formative education
Mike Butera:years, I was, you know, learning at home and able to build all of
Mike Butera:these different course classes, you know, studies in areas that
Mike Butera:you wouldn't normally get to. And so I kind of broke out of
Mike Butera:that normal, you know, middle of high school mode. So when I went
Mike Butera:to college, I was able to get in the honors program actually
Mike Butera:didn't have the the SAT score for it. Standardized testing
Mike Butera:wasn't one of my strong points. But I went into the office, and
Mike Butera:I said, Hey, I really, yeah, I really want to do this. Yeah.
Mike Butera:And it worked. We got in a conversation. I said, I said
Mike Butera:what I was passionate about. And they said, well, we'll give you
Mike Butera:a semester, we'll see you know, this, we'll see if this works
Mike Butera:out. And it worked out. And And then luckily, that program gave
Mike Butera:me kind of free rein to piece together these different fields,
Mike Butera:you had to justify why. So like one of my majors was music
Mike Butera:production. And I actually studied music, composition,
Mike Butera:performance, business, you know, recording, distribution, like
Mike Butera:all these different aspects . . .
Gigi Johnson:It helps you're at Belmont because all those were
Gigi Johnson:available at Belmont.
Mike Butera:Exactly. Yeah. And yeah, it's very unique
Gigi Johnson:Did you go right to grad school, or did you have
Gigi Johnson:opportunity. And similar with philosophy and sociology, the
Gigi Johnson:two there was a lot of overlap and critical theory and things
Gigi Johnson:any sidebars?
Gigi Johnson:but, but I was able to kind of carve out those paths. And then
Mike Butera:I had about a year that I was saving up for it. I
Mike Butera:when I got to grad school at Virginia Tech,
Mike Butera:was working at some restaurants and things in Nashville and
Mike Butera:doing music and you know, that kind of stuff. But it was all in
Mike Butera:preparation to go to grad school.
Gigi Johnson:But sometimes it's a good buffer or baking point or
Gigi Johnson:settling out or because you then went right from masters to
Gigi Johnson:doctorate, which is a bit of a journey. Know why Yeah. Why grad
Gigi Johnson:school? Why is it the fact that you had this lovely blended
Gigi Johnson:thing that would thrive in grad school or that you had gotten
Gigi Johnson:distracted?
Mike Butera:I hadn't found sound studies yet. I went to
Mike Butera:grad school because I thought I wanted to be a social theory
Mike Butera:professor. And that could be in a philosophy or sociology
Mike Butera:department. But I knew I wanted to do that. I was especially
Mike Butera:studying technology and social networks at the time. So
Gigi Johnson:yes, and this was 2008 ish.
Unknown:I started grad school in '07. So I finished up
Unknown:undergrad and in '05 and then in December '05 and then yeah, just
Unknown:over a year. started grad school, the . . . . So I went to
Unknown:Virginia Tech . . . The master's program in philosophy
Unknown:there was analytic compared to Continental, just two branches
Unknown:of philosophy. Very kind of hardcore logic focused, not the
Unknown:kind of philosophy where you just talk about what's on your
Unknown:mind and and see if you can come up with new ideas. That was
Unknown:primarily my style. So I was suddenly in this rigorous sort
Unknown:of engineering driven culture at VT, which I learned a ton. I
Unknown:also found sound studies. In the first year, while I was there, I
Unknown:didn't know it existed, it was a nascent field at the time. And I
Unknown:read a mention of it in a book on cyber culture studies, that
Unknown:sound had been under explored in this field. And I was like, oh,
Unknown:and it just all the lights came on. And you know, all these
Unknown:different passions kind of magnetize together. So I, I
Unknown:joined a Ph. D. program at Virginia Tech, that didn't quite
Unknown:exist yet. It hadn't been finalized with the state. It
Unknown:was, it was the first truly interdisciplinary PhD in the
Unknown:country. And it was between philosophy, history, sociology,
Unknown:political theory, things like that. So I was the first
Unknown:student, PhD student in this program. And I was part of
Unknown:getting it, you know, I was in those meetings with the
Unknown:regulators or whatever, in academia, to figure out what it
Unknown:meant. And therefore, it was a blank slate. And I said, I want
Unknown:to do sound studies. And they're like, great, go for it. And so I
Unknown:was able to create this whole PhD program around this new
Unknown:field and travel around the world and go to all these
Unknown:conferences and be a part of the new journals that were coming
Unknown:out. And it was, it was amazing. So anyway, I think the theme
Unknown:academically was, I, I never, I was never interested in sort of
Unknown:finding the boxes to check off or, you know, put on the shelf
Unknown:or whatever. I was always looking for ways to kind of
Unknown:integrate different fields together and find something new.
Gigi Johnson:So let's get back to the more current future. And
Gigi Johnson:so you've got a past, a build it yourself for yourself, blending,
Gigi Johnson:exploring, poking some things in the eye that are, are
Gigi Johnson:traditional. And so then you went you created was it assault,
Gigi Johnson:where you were then building company building lots of
Gigi Johnson:different things?
Mike Butera:Yeah.
Gigi Johnson:What bridged you from we're helping, consulting,
Gigi Johnson:building launching consumer products to I want to start a
Gigi Johnson:company, and then what led into the first instrument? And, and
Gigi Johnson:why Kickstarter, so if we could make that journey conversation.
Mike Butera:So this was. . . Yeah, back to 2010 that that
Mike Butera:sort of pivotal moment. One of the things was, it worked, it
Mike Butera:was working, the consulting was doing well, I was able to come
Mike Butera:up with ideas like for these smart home speakers that would
Mike Butera:all connect with each other work with industrial designers,
Mike Butera:mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, and so on. Go to
Mike Butera:China go to the factory oversee production and then see it you
Mike Butera:know, actually do well in the market. And so this was all menopause
Gigi Johnson:menopause a second because you explained a lot of
Gigi Johnson:your gestation Did you have any tech skills at this stage? Did
Gigi Johnson:you learn things yourself? Or did so? What was that tech
Gigi Johnson:component and when the some people build things and do
Gigi Johnson:things and they've been taking apart their parents toasters,
Gigi Johnson:since they were five, or they've been coding forever, or they've
Gigi Johnson:been doing robot design and building so so I'm not hearing a
Gigi Johnson:building story, this is this part of the superpowers of your
Gigi Johnson:partner is this stuff that you learned or trusted other people
Gigi Johnson:with?
Mike Butera:So I was always yes, I was always taking things
Mike Butera:apart and and, you know, as a kid and onward, when I got into
Mike Butera:studio tech in college, I was repairing gear building tube,
Mike Butera:you know, gear and whatever. So I electrically you know,
Mike Butera:familiar but Not an electrical engineer. A lot of training in
Mike Butera:design happened from my dad from floral design, you know, more
Mike Butera:aesthetically, I would say. But then I learned a lot of that
Mike Butera:hands on during the consulting phase, you know, how consumer
Mike Butera:tech was actually built? Coding, I always dabbled, but, you know,
Mike Butera:some people, most people are so much better at that than I am.
Mike Butera:So I've always been able to translate the kind of design
Mike Butera:intent and understand the architecture of it, but that
Mike Butera:was, that was never my thing. So yes, a lot of trust, a lot of
Mike Butera:collaboration with people. And, and I felt like I was, I was
Mike Butera:discovering that my role was this hub or a translator,
Mike Butera:between culture and product design, ways of thinking, and in
Mike Butera:the weeds, engineering and just, you know, always keeping that
Mike Butera:that strand connected. Because so many products are either, you
Mike Butera:know, impossible to build, or possible to build and no one
Mike Butera:wants them and
Gigi Johnson:are so expensive to build that no one wants it at
Gigi Johnson:that price point, right. So that in many ways, specialty music
Gigi Johnson:instruments, I mean, the ones that I'm aware of what Chapman
Gigi Johnson:stick and other things where you kind of go so expensive to build
Gigi Johnson:and creating customized and not met as mass products. That's
Gigi Johnson:been on my wish list
Mike Butera:for a while and let's let's tag a corner this
Mike Butera:conversation in terms of with instruments, what, what are the
Mike Butera:cultural references or familiarity that people need?
Mike Butera:You know, Chapman stick is a good example. cool technology,
Mike Butera:you can make all kinds of sound with it. People get virtuosic in
Mike Butera:amazing ways with it.
Gigi Johnson:So complicated. It play. Yes. Yeah.
Mike Butera:I mean, it's just like a theory bomb. Music Theory
Mike Butera:of like,
Gigi Johnson:I can to pause everybody, because I would never
Gigi Johnson:have known a Chapman stick other than I was at a small concert,
Gigi Johnson:and someone was playing it. And I was so blown away by watching
Gigi Johnson:total virtuosity. So it's kind of like, a unstructured guitar
Gigi Johnson:had a baby with a bass. But it's sort of two directions. Yeah,
Gigi Johnson:it's like a harp hanging from a bait. So it was very much a
Gigi Johnson:cultural mashup. And but, uh, simply, the virtuosity was like
Gigi Johnson:watching a phenomenal heart play, or were you just watching?
Gigi Johnson:Oh, my gosh, but I went to go price one. I'm like, Oh, my
Gigi Johnson:gosh, that is such an expensive instrument. And it is sort of
Gigi Johnson:art. It's almost the opposite of what you guys have been building.
Mike Butera:Right? Well, and so then get back to that. So why,
Mike Butera:why build a new type of musical instrument? was the question I
Mike Butera:was asking myself when I got up the courage to say, Yeah, I want
Mike Butera:to start my own company. Yeah, I want to, I want to build a new
Mike Butera:thing. I mentioned, the user interface challenge of all these
Mike Butera:apps were out there. But you don't want to just touch a
Mike Butera:screen, you want something in your hands? Well, that's great.
Mike Butera:What should that thing be. And we could have designed a very
Mike Butera:specific instrument, a singular instrument, like most instance,
Mike Butera:instruments, or singular, you, it's intended to be played one
Mike Butera:way you learn how to play it that way, and then you're good
Mike Butera:at it. My goal was to create a plural instrument, an
Mike Butera:instrument, we call it a multi instrument, something that you
Mike Butera:could actually pick up and play in all these different ways. And
Mike Butera:versatility was one of the goals. Because why not digital,
Mike Butera:lets you do that. We can build form factors that allow for
Mike Butera:multiple positions and gestures and playing styles. So creating
Mike Butera:this universal musical instrument has a versatility
Mike Butera:benefit. But there's another even more important benefit that
Mike Butera:I was really going for, which is approachability. The theory that
Mike Butera:I had at the time, and we're still playing this out, we're
Mike Butera:still seeing if this is, you know going to be true in the
Mike Butera:world. The theory is that if you multiply what a thing can do,
Mike Butera:than any one thing that it does is less intimidating. Because
Mike Butera:you pick it up and you say I'm gonna just gonna play some
Mike Butera:drums. You know what, I'm going to have some fun and pick it up
Mike Butera:and strum it like a guitar or put it down on the table and now
Mike Butera:it's a piano. None of those things are the right way to play
Mike Butera:it and therefore you're not playing Seeing it wrong. And so
Mike Butera:creating this universal instrument also has the benefit
Mike Butera:of giving more people the sense that they could just casually
Mike Butera:approach it, see what it does enjoy that, and not compare
Mike Butera:themselves to the best musician in the world who's so much
Mike Butera:better at them at this one singular thing. And that's, that
Mike Butera:really was that moment where I thought, Okay, this is going to
Mike Butera:work, we do have a new conversation to, you know, bring
Mike Butera:to the world of what instruments can be. And yeah, that's when we
Mike Butera:started designing what we call the instrument one, which was
Mike Butera:our first product.
Gigi Johnson:It makes me think of Dan Shneiderman's
Gigi Johnson:philosophies of creativity, technology support tools, now
Gigi Johnson:I'm gonna go nerdy for a bit where it's like a metaphor as a
Gigi Johnson:doorway. So you can have a low threshold or a high threshold, a
Gigi Johnson:wide doorway, that you can stuff many things into it, or a tall
Gigi Johnson:doorway, where you can go to extreme expertise. And I always
Gigi Johnson:come to a new technology and go, is it an easy entry? Is it a
Gigi Johnson:wide doorway? Or does it have extreme sophistications? Like me
Gigi Johnson:trying to come in to, to Photoshop? Yeah, I know, I could
Gigi Johnson:possibly start Photoshop fairly easily for about five minutes.
Gigi Johnson:And then it's like, Wait, I don't like kind of grok it I'm
Gigi Johnson:doing blender right now. It's it's like, immediately high
Gigi Johnson:doorway, wide walls, high ceiling. But the doorway is so
Gigi Johnson:harsh as you're looking to make it. So it's an easy entry. But
Gigi Johnson:sophisticated uses and wide uses, you're kind of making an
Gigi Johnson:infinite doorway.
Mike Butera:That's it's a goal. One of one of the ways we do
Mike Butera:that we call it scalable complexity. In the history of
Mike Butera:instruments, they're based on physics, of resonance,
Mike Butera:vibration, resonance. And therefore the material, the
Mike Butera:size, all those aspects of it had to be pretty fixed, there
Mike Butera:was some variables that you could add or subtract, but that
Mike Butera:was it. And even the early days of electric and electronic
Mike Butera:instrumentation with early synthesizers, and things, it
Mike Butera:also pretty fixed circuits were kind of baked in, you had the
Mike Butera:armed Martino, one of my favorite instruments, where you,
Mike Butera:you could plug in these different they were like
Mike Butera:speakers, but they were actually not speakers like we normally
Mike Butera:think some of them were gongs, others were paper, others, you
Mike Butera:know, were wood. And so the point was, when you plug in the
Mike Butera:speaker, it's going to sound like a totally different
Mike Butera:instrument. But it's because of the physics of it. With digital
Mike Butera:tools, now we can actually create these adaptive devices.
Mike Butera:And so if we get the ergonomics, right, based on simple human
Mike Butera:forms, and averages of hand size, and all kinds of things.
Mike Butera:So similar to say, a game controller, or remote, or all
Mike Butera:kinds of other objects we use, we can program these devices to
Mike Butera:respond differently based on what you want to do with them.
Mike Butera:We can receive different gestures in ways that we make
Mike Butera:musical, not in the same way. So if you want to strum something,
Mike Butera:versus tap it, versus bow it, or press it, these are all
Mike Butera:different gestures that we can program and say, well, now we're
Mike Butera:going to put it in a sort of piano mode, or a guitar mode, or
Mike Butera:a drum machine mode or things like that. And that's actually
Mike Butera:one of the things that we patented, was this concept of
Mike Butera:the multi instrument as a switchable responsive device,
Mike Butera:rather than, you know, based on one way to play. So that that
Mike Butera:was one of the key, you know, founding principles of what
Mike Butera:we're doing, it's a bit hard to explain. And again, maybe, maybe
Mike Butera:it'll be the way of the future or maybe it's a moment in
Mike Butera:history, but it seems to be working.
Gigi Johnson:So for for people trying to visualize this who are
Gigi Johnson:listening to this, that the first one which was instrument
Gigi Johnson:one, kind of look like a mash up a long, thin strip that had
Gigi Johnson:sensors on the top that you could, that also had
Gigi Johnson:accelerometers and other motion sensors, so that you could take
Gigi Johnson:that same essentially bar and play it, hold it up and strum
Gigi Johnson:it, move it in space. So that it wasn't just taking one of the
Gigi Johnson:metaphors or affordance sets but let you take patterns that you
Gigi Johnson:already knew from something else and bring it over. Yeah,
Mike Butera:absolutely. Yeah. We, with the design of the
Mike Butera:instrument one, it took just over four years to go from idea
Mike Butera:into a product that we could, you know, announce to the world.
Mike Butera:So a lot of iterations, six different prototype generations
Mike Butera:in there a lot of a lot of different ways to look at it
Mike Butera:initially, for instance, it had a doc for an iPhone. Because
Mike Butera:Doc's were really cool, which made sense at the time, right?
Mike Butera:It was great. It was great. It was it was really neat, because
Mike Butera:it became this self contained instrument that was before
Mike Butera:Bluetooth was really possible or you know, even just USB
Mike Butera:connection more generally. So. So anyway, it it evolved a few
Mike Butera:different ways. It ended up being a device, we launched it
Mike Butera:on Kickstarter, in 2015. We didn't know what it would do,
Mike Butera:the design of it was we ended up making it in plastic, so we
Mike Butera:could mass manufacture it. The sensors were called force
Mike Butera:sensing resistors, it was this, this kind of sheet of film
Mike Butera:underneath a, an almost rubbery surface that could sense touch
Mike Butera:and pressure velocity, you could slide on it, it was almost like
Mike Butera:a computer trackpad. But but a rubber surface a little harder
Mike Butera:to play than that. And, and it had these string features on it.
Mike Butera:And we did that because in early testing, we found that a lot of
Mike Butera:the musicians again, this was in Nashville, a lot of the
Mike Butera:musicians were very string focused, and really wanted that
Mike Butera:tactile feel of having, you know, muscle memory. Yeah, yeah.
Gigi Johnson:This was not fret started, they wanted friends.
Mike Butera:This is not a not a mistake. But as we talked about
Mike Butera:Chorda it's interesting, we took off the strings for Chorda,
Mike Butera:similar form factor kind of ukulele size bar. But Chorda has
Mike Butera:pads and a strong mobile area. So insert one accord a both have
Mike Butera:those things, but insert one had the string features again,
Mike Butera:because musicians were asking for that. Insert one can do
Mike Butera:things that stringed instruments can't do that other instruments
Mike Butera:can't do. Every note can have its own distortion or for Broto.
Mike Butera:You can apply effects to every little touch. If you press
Mike Butera:harder, you know, you could bring in delay or whatever you
Mike Butera:wanting to like amazing things. But what it didn't have was real
Mike Butera:strings. And for those, say guitarists approaching this with
Mike Butera:the muscle memory of strings back to physics, they wanted to
Mike Butera:behave exactly like strings behave. And that was
Mike Butera:problematic. It was a problem that I think is quite
Mike Butera:interesting, and highlights this this paradigm shift between
Mike Butera:physical and virtual instruments, virtuosic
Gigi Johnson:to write I live off my business as being of not
Gigi Johnson:having to think about it, and being able to create art after
Gigi Johnson:years of practice.
Mike Butera:Yeah, well, Aristotle's notion of virtue
Mike Butera:has, you know, not quite as much to do with what we think about,
Mike Butera:like, you know, a virtuous person is like, really good or
Mike Butera:something, for Aristotle was more like being good at
Mike Butera:something. And, and having the virtue of, of, you know, being
Mike Butera:capable having the affordances matched to what you're doing.
Mike Butera:And so, there's an interesting just to get kind of deep on that
Mike Butera:of the virtue and virtual, that we can actually map the same
Mike Butera:behaviors, the same affordances from the physical world into the
Mike Butera:what we now call the virtual world, as long as people have
Mike Butera:the virtue of being able to use it. And all that means in normal
Mike Butera:language now is like the capability or in some cases,
Mike Butera:just the confidence of reaching out and touching it. If you can,
Mike Butera:strum your hand through the air. And if a guitar is under your
Mike Butera:hand, you'll strum a guitar. But if you're in an augmented
Mike Butera:reality environment, that can detect your hand moving through
Mike Butera:the air, and you strum virtual strings. It's the same result.
Mike Butera:And so you have the virtue of being able to strum the
Mike Butera:technology is going to determine exactly how that happens, but it
Mike Butera:might not matter what the inner workings are of it as long as
Mike Butera:you get to intend for something to happen, and it happens in the
Mike Butera:end. That is, you know, that's enough. And again, this is how I
Mike Butera:tend to think about product design, like, can we design?
Mike Butera:Tough stuff?
Gigi Johnson:People will expect the haptic feedback of the
Gigi Johnson:string, right? So that they there still is, then they would
Gigi Johnson:like that interaction with that. I'm right now building things in
Gigi Johnson:spatial audio and VR. And so really thinking about what then
Gigi Johnson:that response is, and how sorry, we could go down. So holes here.
Gigi Johnson:Yeah, let let me let me take you down to rabbit holes to maybe
Gigi Johnson:wrap up this conversation. And because there's lots of things I
Gigi Johnson:would love to talk about on this, which is, so one of the
Gigi Johnson:reinforcing elements is the retail sales element of musical
Gigi Johnson:instruments you came in through Kickstarter, you now have come
Gigi Johnson:in with several instruments. So you also had the and I have to
Gigi Johnson:look at my notes, the orba, which I've had my hands on in
Gigi Johnson:play, but very much of a circular modality, really
Gigi Johnson:hitting were the folks who are possibly thinking of it in terms
Gigi Johnson:of beats or pads as a different modality and cheaper and
Gigi Johnson:handset. And then you've taken that through Kickstarter, and
Gigi Johnson:you knew, you're taking the current quarter, you had
Gigi Johnson:something or have something called orbit cam, that's a video
Gigi Johnson:also, I
Mike Butera:was mentioned, the the AR stuff didn't come out of
Mike Butera:nowhere, we've spent the past couple of years really figuring
Mike Butera:out what's possible through the camera, as a musical interface.
Mike Butera:So and the screen itself. So orbit cam, for instance, is an
Mike Butera:app that you can make music directly in live video on your
Mike Butera:screen. And there are these pads and you can play whatever sound
Mike Butera:you want. And it will automatically get baked into the
Mike Butera:video kind of SoundTracking your life. It works with our
Mike Butera:hardware, but you can also use it on its own. And so yeah, what
Mike Butera:we found is the transference of our tech, from the physical
Mike Butera:products into apps on to a physical product you already own
Mike Butera:your phone is all possible. And it's really just where are you?
Mike Butera:What do you want to do? You know, what's what's fun at the
Mike Butera:moment? And, and so yeah, we've been experimenting with AR, we
Mike Butera:did a big launch with Snapchat last year with artists, lenses
Mike Butera:and ways to make any song interactive, which is really
Mike Butera:fun, using new AR tools and motion tracking, things like
Mike Butera:that. And it's all the same thinking it's it's a lot of the
Mike Butera:same kind of UX design that we put into our hardware
Mike Butera:instruments that we design in the virtual space as well. So
Mike Butera:that's that's been really fun. So
Gigi Johnson:given the retail dominance, that the retail
Gigi Johnson:challenges, yeah, in the current era of retail stores going away.
Gigi Johnson:So they're feeling of fragility and needing to move volume. How
Gigi Johnson:in the world do you sell this? A Kickstarter has been your friend
Gigi Johnson:multiple times now including recently? To me, that's a
Gigi Johnson:natural friction, and a quest retail scale. With retailers,
Gigi Johnson:that's their ownership spot, right? How do you then get to
Gigi Johnson:people and get to the learning complex and getting to people to
Gigi Johnson:see this as an option other than by word of mouth, and great
Gigi Johnson:Kickstarter marketing.
Mike Butera:So Kickstarter is really this moment, just the
Mike Butera:launch moment. It's actually a pre launch moment, it's when we
Mike Butera:develop an instrument enough that it works, that we can
Mike Butera:demonstrate that we can make music in our case, three times
Mike Butera:now, we've brought that to Kickstarter and said, Hey, we
Mike Butera:haven't manufactured this yet. We want to, we just want to make
Mike Butera:sure you actually want it. Here's the concept. Here's how
Mike Butera:it plays. What do you think? And all three times that's gone
Mike Butera:quite well. And so we simultaneously we're having
Mike Butera:conversations with retailers, not only in the musical
Mike Butera:instrument space, but consumer electronics and and more
Mike Butera:lifestyle retail as well, at the moment design store, for
Mike Butera:instance, has been a great partner over the years.
Mike Butera:Retailers increasingly don't take as many risks at launch,
Mike Butera:they want to see that something has already worked. And so I see
Mike Butera:the two functioning quite well together they have for us that
Mike Butera:we've been able to go out to Kickstarter, find early adopters
Mike Butera:who are like, Yeah, that should exist in the world. Let's help
Mike Butera:you make it. And by doing that, we're showing that there's a
Mike Butera:demand for this and retailers want to be more in the middle of
Mike Butera:the adoption curve and or even past the chasm, as they say. And
Mike Butera:so We're able to prove momentum in the market. With early
Mike Butera:adopters, that's, it's been great for us the Kickstarter
Mike Butera:community is awesome. And, and the other fact is we sell most
Mike Butera:of our products direct through our website, we do sell through
Mike Butera:Amazon as well. But, you know, going direct means we have a
Mike Butera:relationship with our customers, we, you know, we can communicate
Mike Butera:with them. If you buy on, if you buy or buy on Amazon right now.
Mike Butera:And you don't go to our website and specifically sign up for
Mike Butera:our, you know, email list, you might not know that we've just
Mike Butera:updated the firmware and added new features or that there are
Mike Butera:all these new songs and ways to play them, you know, we we'd
Mike Butera:like to develop this community around our products. And it also
Mike Butera:shows on social media, we have amazing engagement with people,
Mike Butera:they, they make little songs, they post them, there's a whole
Mike Butera:sort of supportive community around just this casual music
Mike Butera:making. And that's because we have that direct relationship.
Mike Butera:And we're not going through too many intermediaries. That said,
Mike Butera:we we have great relationships with retailers, Guitar Center,
Mike Butera:and you know, all kinds of people, but we're really focused
Mike Butera:on as direct as we can get with the customer.
Gigi Johnson:Mike, we have covered your highly nonlinear
Gigi Johnson:journey, you're putting it together from building your own
Gigi Johnson:homeschooling to building your own combination of degrees to
Gigi Johnson:building your own musical instruments and companies and
Gigi Johnson:products. What have we not mentioned? Is there anything you
Gigi Johnson:as we wrap up, that you'd like to mention, we haven't touched
Gigi Johnson:on?
Mike Butera:I think, overall, for me, the the idea of building
Mike Butera:a company was always secondary, it it had to be done, if I was
Mike Butera:going to pursue this stuff, because I couldn't just couldn't
Mike Butera:just build it all myself, I had to work with people who had all
Mike Butera:these different skill sets, I couldn't just fund it myself, I
Mike Butera:had to find people who wanted to build this opportunity into a
Mike Butera:business that could actually make money someday. And, and I
Mike Butera:didn't want to do it myself. This, it's too much fun to work
Mike Butera:with other people. So the business the corporation is is a
Mike Butera:body of people that is this kind of this kind of place where we
Mike Butera:can all pursue that together. There are many other ways this
Mike Butera:can be done, there are awesome open source projects in the
Mike Butera:world, and you know, all kinds of things. And in music, you see
Mike Butera:a lot of that as well. The fact that this is a business also
Mike Butera:means that there are other realities to what it takes to
Mike Butera:run it. And that's something I've learned so much about that
Mike Butera:over the past decade or so. Things I didn't know, I wanted
Mike Butera:to learn just just the total reality of doing this. And
Mike Butera:again, I mentioned I grew up in the family flower shop. So I had
Mike Butera:that entrepreneurial, you know, context of just how hard it is
Mike Butera:to figure this out. It's it's exciting. But like you said,
Mike Butera:it's it's business is also very nonlinear. Especially with the
Mike Butera:economy going all over the place. There's really no sense
Mike Butera:of that classic stability that you might have had decades ago
Mike Butera:where if you build something, you know, it'll get out there
Mike Butera:you advertise in magazines, people will read it and mail
Mike Butera:order your stuff like it's nothing is that set, now. It's
Mike Butera:changing by the day. So that's another exciting aspect of this.
Mike Butera:I'm glad we mostly talked about design and culture and why. But
Mike Butera:the vehicle that has enabled this to happen has been an
Mike Butera:actual, an actual business. And that's, that's cool, too. It's a
Mike Butera:very different side than I learned and taught in academia,
Mike Butera:about how, you know, capitalism works on a grand historical
Mike Butera:scale. This is this is how it's working at a at a product and
Mike Butera:team level scale, which is it's it's been awesome to learn.
Gigi Johnson:Excellent. So this episode will go out and be out
Gigi Johnson:in the ether. Who would you like to reach back out to you?
Mike Butera:Oh, well, anyone who wants to collaborate on this
Mike Butera:kind of stuff. We are right now exploring a lot of different
Mike Butera:ways to get artists content into our instruments so that our
Mike Butera:instruments become these interactive music devices. We
Mike Butera:already have all the tech we've we've done some of that we want
Mike Butera:to do more. We're also very interested in multimedia, music,
Mike Butera:and we've done some cool experiments there. We want to
Mike Butera:expand that and see our instruments as controllers for
Mike Butera:making music in multiple senses. So yeah, just more. I'm just
Mike Butera:looking for collaborations that would be, that would be awesome.
Gigi Johnson:And how should people best reach out to you?
Gigi Johnson:Oh,
Mike Butera:we you can go to our website we have a, you know,
Mike Butera:general contact at Artiphon. And I'm just Mike@artifact.com if
Mike Butera:anyone wants to reach out. Excellent.
Gigi Johnson:And we'll put the various links in the show notes.
Gigi Johnson:Mike, thank you so much for joining us.
Mike Butera:Thank you. That was really fun.
