Allison interviews Ben Yu, founder and CEO of Monar, about their Canvas Speaker. The Monar Canvas Speaker is a smart device that merges the display of renowned artworks and music playback with live lyrics, creating an immersive audio-visual experience. Monar is made to be hung on a wall just like a piece of art. It measures about 25” high by 21” wide by 1.85” thick and weighs 13 lbs. It contains 8 high-quality speakers and delivers 90 W maximum of audio power. Monar is compatible with major music apps and can access over 50,000 high-resolution masterpieces, such as those by Picasso, Monet, da Vinci, and Dali. Monar uses AI to transform art masterpieces to a variety of styles while also animating the artwork to create high-def GIFs.
Learn more a https://monarai.com/
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Transcript of Interview:
Allison: Well, we walked by what looks to be a picture frame that’s got a lot of different graphics going on on it, but I think it’s also a speaker. So I’m here with Ben Yu from Monar to tell us all about it.
Ben Yu: Thank you. Hi, everyone. So I’m Ben from Monar, and the product is called the Monar Canvas Speaker. So first of all, it’s a canvas that we have over 50,000 of masterpieces that you can display on the screen.
Allison: So he’s got a phone in his hand and he’s bringing up the masterpieces. There’s the girl with the pearl earring.
Ben Yu: Yep. Like Van Gogh, Monet, you have all of them. And secondly, it’s a speaker that we have a feature called Live Lyrics that displays different designs of the lyrics in real time. And also we have integrated AI with this. That’s the AI generates images based on the lyrics of the song that you’re playing in real time as well.
Allison: So you’ve got the song to lyrics to masterpieces, but then which picture is it picking? If you’ve got it?
Ben Yu: Well, you can choose. You can choose the masterpieces or you can choose to use AI to generate based on the lyrics of the song.
Allison: Oh, wow.
Ben Yu: So it works both ways.
Allison: Where is the music coming from?
Allison: Do you have to have in your app or?
Allison: You’re using Spotify or whatever?
Ben Yu: Yeah, yeah. We support Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Deezer, anything.
Allison: I got you. Okay. Okay. So let’s take a look at this. So we see a very bright display here that has some cool looking AI generated graphics. But what’s going on behind the scenes? He’s going to go that way. Let’s go this way.
Ben Yu: So if you look closely, we have eight speaker drivers built in here two subwoofers to play the bass and then the two mids at each side and also two tweeters, one tweeter on each side, totally that’s eight. So it’s a 2.1 channel stereo. Also we have over 3000 milliliters of speaker volume to make sure the echo is really good.
Allison: That sounds great. So when do you expect this to be available?
Ben Yu: We will be on Kickstarter very soon, probably March this year, just in two months time.
Allison: All right. This is a really fun product. Thanks for talking to us.
Ben Yu: Thank you so much.