(CNN) -- Air guitar players, bus stop drummers and office desk virtuosos, rejoice: being a slave to the rhythm has just become a lot more fun. Mogees is a new technology that turns any object into a musical instrument, by converting the vibrations you make when you touch it into sound.
Here's how it works: you stick a small sensor to the surface you want to play with, be it a tree or a fruit bowl or your bathtub, and then connect it to your smartphone. An app running on it detects and analyzes the vibrations, transforming them into musical notes. The sound can then be amplified by hooking up the smartphone to headphones or speakers.
The sound you hear is really coming from the object, it's not a virtual reconstruction.
Bruno Zamborlin
"The sound you hear is really coming from the object, it's not a virtual reconstruction," says Bruno Zamborlin, the 30-year-old music technology researcher who invented the device. "It's a principle called physically inspired sound system. When you play a real instrument, like a guitar, the sound is created by the combination of an exciter and a resonator. The exciter is the plectrum in your hand that hits the strings, and the resonator is the combination of the strings and the body of the guitar. Mogees works in a similar way: everything that is picked up by the sensor -- your gestures, the object itself -- is the exciter, and the resonator is emulated through the software. We just modify the signal to respect musical rules. We augment it."

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/09/03/tech/innovation/mogees-make-music-from-anything/index.html