Wouldn't it be great if everybody could experience playing live music together? For those wanting to get into playing electronic music, the vast range of instruments, both hardware and software based, can be overwhelming. What if we were to lower the requirements and make playing accessible to everyone?

We wanted to provide a simple and easy way to experience some of the concepts of playing together; to provide people with an experience that encourages them to generate an interest and take it further. We didn't build a new platform for content generation, we built a new environment to promote the exploration of collaboration.

HRMNI is welcoming, playful and fun straight out-of-the-box.

HRMNI uses your phone as a controller to trigger sounds. Users connect to a central device that is hosting a session, playing the sound for the group of players. By opening the app and facing your camera at the host you can join a jam session. Here you select an instrument, begin collaborating and moving around the surrounding space to affect the sounds.

We ensured that there are low hardware requirements. The majority of people have a smartphone, so we leveraged these devices. The full expression of traditional complex instruments cannot be achieved and this is a trade-off we see worth it, welcoming new users to play.

We kept it simple and intuitive. By having a narrower scope for the initial instruments, we can constrain certain things that mean the instruments are more likely to work together. We can constrain instruments to the same key or take advantage of quantisation. Simplicity means that anybody can collaborate.

The skill level required to get started with HRMNI is accessible. We only provide modules where interaction easily triggers sound. There are no complex modules that require special knowledge to get started.

Exploration is achieved through simple interactions such as distance from each other and distance from the session host device.

We want to expand the range of simple, intuitive modules and add relationships between the controllers.
We want to add collaborative modules where two or more modules can be used in a certain way, their relationship and interactions affecting the same sound.
We want to work with third-party developers, hosting light versions of their software-synths and instruments. This could be a valuable relationship to showcase both of our technologies.