Institute For The Future

The Electrospit

Wearables for Digital Music-Makers

Music has always been a huge part of wearable technology—but most of the innovation has been devices for listening, not creating. Musician Bosco Kante, brand manager Maya Kante, music producer Pete Ho, and rapper/digital strategist Lance Coleman want to change that. They’ve created a smartphone-connected wearable instrument, the Electrospit, that functions like a portable talkbox—a device that lets you “vocalize” an instrument by changing its sound with your mouth. And they might be the ideal people to introduce such a device to the world.

Bosco Kante composed the theme song to “In Living Color” while in college. He has produced hits for Bay Area mainstays such as E-40, and won a Grammy for a collaboration with Kanye West. But while Kante is best know for his music, he is also an inventor and technologist. Known to many as the “talkbox king,” the devices he uses to make music have largely been his own creations.

“Making talkboxes was an oral tradition at the time,” Maya Kante explained to Future Now. “You couldn’t go to Guitar Center and pick one up or go on the Internet to find instructions. Someone had to teach you, and then you’d pass that knowledge down to someone else.”

Bosco Kante was part of a maker culture that existed long before there was a capital ‘M’ maker movement. All over the U.S., particularly in communities of color, innovators have been pioneering DIY projects from modifying bicycles with sound systems to creating completely new shells for gaming devices. He modified early cell phones, disassembling them and spray-painting the cases for friends and he created his own custom turntables and mixers with affordable components. “It was innovation based on necessity, not leisure time.” He hacked his first talkbox together with a digital keyboard, an ASR-10 sampler, and a home stereo amp. He learned the technique to use it from renowned G-funk producer Battlecat. And Kante has never stopped iterating since.

“I’m always taking technology that was designed for something and adapting it,” Bosco Kante said.

But the inspiration to make a wearable talkbox came from the frequent problems he had with his instruments’ size. Traveling was always a difficultly; getting through security at airports often proved troublesome. And it also affected his ability to perform live.

“There’s been a number of times where I didn’t perform because the stage layout couldn’t accommodate my equipment,” the “talkbox king” recalled. For instance, when he performed with Kanye West for the American Music Awards, he wasn’t able to play live and instead had to lip-sync, a totally different kind of performance.

“I wanted to make it convenient to have it in a backpack where I can just pull it out and jump on stage and do my thing,” Bosco Kante said. But their vision for the device evolved, from an instrument for Kante’s personal use to a consumer device.

The group aims to bring music back to the body—digital music creation is now the norm, but it mostly happens at a desktop—and give digital musicians the freedom to perform live. But they also wanted to bring attention to under-recognized innovators.

“Part of the motivation is wanting to be an example of, and put a spotlight on, people of color who are innovators who are creating and making technology,” Maya Kante explains. “Because it’s been happening for a long time.”

They decided a way to make the device more light-weight and accessible was to leverage a device most people already have: a mobile phone. “You can take advantage of the synthesizer that’s already in the phone. Instead of an external keyboard, you can use a different sound generation technology,” Bosco Kante asserts.

He started off creating prototypes by hand. “With PVC pipes, it was a little bit too crude because it gets hard to get good tolerances and make components airtight,” so he turned to 3D printing for more recent prototypes.

They created a solid Electrospit prototype as part of their residency at Zoo Labs, a West Oakland-based music accelerator founded by Vinitha Watson. It took a lot of experimentation (at one point he tried putting the speaker in his mouth, which actually worked fairly well) but now the prototype of the device has already been used in recordings with artists like Big Boi of Outkast, Phantogram, and Skrillex.

But as you might expect, the Kantes and their team don’t have any plans to stop experimenting with this technology any time soon. They have an abundance of ideas for how their tech might develop in the coming years.

“The technology could advance to allow you to sound like a specific charactor or icon, say Beyonce,” Maya Kante speculates. “Another one of our founders explained it could be used as a controller for other devices in the house, so it could bring singing and music back into people’s daily lives. There are a lot of possibilities to think through— we’re just getting started.”