I received an email from Ziv bar ilan, founder and designer of Zoybar.net. Zoybar is a modular hardware platform for creating custom electric string instruments and effects. The basic Zoybar kits enable you to assemble a variety of electric string instruments that could be mounted with different sound effects. Get this: he was inspired by the open source movement. Ziv explains further:

In the virtual world of software production, every individual programmer can be a powerful autonomous production unit (provided with a web connection and a computer) whereas in the physical world materials, energy, production lines, storage and marketing takes much more time, money and risks to become a reality.

The Zoybar components provide research and development tools as a sustainable, playable prototype platform. The same modular parts can be assembled as different instruments, can be changed during the performance and also be mounted with numerous special effects, just by adding and changing their position across the profile groves.

My vision is to found an open music instruments hardware community. Every new effect or feature that would be created by an independent developer could become relevant to the whole Zoybar users and community.

So, what might one of these magical instruments look like? Take a gander:

Ziv continues:

Almost any application can be easily attached to the Zoybar platform, just by adding and changing its position across the profile groves with common bolts and screws. This design approach creates great flexibility to produce a high variety of low demand products, while maintaining the high productivity of large scale production. It also helps locating problems and to eliminate overproduction by only producing items when they are needed. Every component and future development would have the same attachment method. This means that all of the parts are also spare parts regardless of their version or manufacturer, keeping them relevant, rather then dumping them as useless waste as soon as a new version has been released.

Keep an eye on Zoybar, folks.

Singing about Modular Musical Instruments