Posts filed under Yamaha

Remember the Yamaha Music Phones that I blogged about a few days ago? They’re a series of concept phones made by Yamaha for Japanese mobile operator KDDI, each of which combines the humble mobile phone with a musical instrument. There was the Trumpet Phone (or TrumPhone, as someone suggested!), drum phone, synth phone, and three others.

Interesting concept, I bet you were thinking, but these phones are just concepts – there’s no way you can produce any real music on them.

Oh really? Just check out the video taken by Akihabara News. I thought the sounds they made were going to be OK, but not much more than you get from an old 16-bit arcade machine.

Boy was I wrong!

Check out the video after the jump.

If you thought Sony Ericsson had the lead in music phones, think again, as Yamaha have developed several prototype music phones that don’t just play MP3s: they let you create your own tunes as well!

Yamaha are well known in the music trade for developing synthesizers and other musical instruments, so it seems only natural that the company,when asked by Japanese carrier KDDI to develop some phone prototypes, should come up with the synthesizer phone.

Come to think of it, it seems such a natural concept that I can’t believe no-one’s thought of it before! There are all manner of DJ and synth-box units you can use with an iPod, which, as the iPhone has proved, is just a mobile phone without the phone, so why not extend the concept and let your phone help you create music ?

More details of Yamaha’s concept music phones after the jump.