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[VIDEO] Mogees Creates an Automotive Musical Instrument Using Mazda3

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Mogees Creates an Automotive Musical Instrument with Mazda

The Mazda3 becomes a musical instrument for Mogees
Photo: MazdaUK via YouTube

If you’ve grown up around a musician, especially a percussionist, you’re familiar with how incessantly they drum their thumbs and palms on every nearby surface, just to share rhythms in their heads with the world (and anyone else sitting nearby). You’ve probably even done it yourself, tapping out a rhythm on your steering wheel.

What if you could turn that rhythm into actual notes, drumming out a melody on any object you choose? Sounds like a musician’s dream!

Mogees, a fun new technology that turns inanimate surfaces and objects into sources of melody, has collaborated with Mazda to create an automotive musical instrument using an actual car: the Mazda3.

You can watch–and listen–to it in action in the commercial below.

M+A Uses Mooges to Bring Music to Mazda Using an Automotive Musical Instrument

Mogees Creates an Automotive Musical Instrument with Mazda 2

Who knew the Mazda3 could be the star of a concert?
Photo: MazdaUK via YouTube

Mazda UK has released a clever, intriguing new ad that promotes two products at once: the Mazda3’s daring KODO-Soul of Motion design and the up-and-coming Mogees gadget.

After appearing on the scene at the beginning of 2014, propelled by a successful Kickstarter campaign in March, Mogees creator Bruno Zamborlin has been touring Europe with a team of musicians promoting, what he calls, “gestural music interface” through art installations, concerts, and interviews.

As described in his TEDx talk, this process uses a microphonic sensor which is placed to a surface, in this case all over the body of the Mazda3, to record different types of touch (like finger taps and fist pounding) on the surface by sound and vibrations.

Mogees Creates an Automotive Musical Instrument with Mazda 3

The microphone placed on the surface
Photo: MazdaUK via YouTube

The input, sent via cord to a smartphone, is linked to corresponding sounds through a synthesizer app and played as music. Different touches produce different lengths, tones, intensities, timbres of sound.

Mogees Creates an Automotive Musical Instrument with Mazda 4

Picking out the sounds for your performance
Photo: MazdaUK via YouTube

In an interview with Wired, Zamborlin explained, “We wanted percussionists to take full advantage of electronic music without losing the feeling of touching a real surface. I would love to see people stop watching their tiny touchscreen all the time and start taking more advantage of what they already have around them.”

After being demonstrated in kitchens, on balloons, by sword swallowers, and many other approaches, Mazda decided to have the Mogees creators perform on a Mazda3, creating an automotive musical instrument. The music in the commercial being played on the automotive musical instrument is an original composition by Italian duo M+A.

If you like what you hear, watch the hashtag #MazdaMogees for more sounds in the future.