Most smart speakers are designed to disappear, cylinders and pucks that sit in a corner and wait for voice commands. That is convenient but also a bit dull; you talk, they respond, and the hardware never really asks you to engage with it. Sound Maestro is a concept that goes the other way, imagining a living room as a small orchestra pit you can actually conduct with gestures instead of just tapping a screen.
Sound Maestro is a speaker inspired by an orchestra conductor that consists of three core parts: the conductor’s podium, the instruments, and the conductor’s baton. When everything is docked together, it reads as a single object, but each of the four modular speakers can be detached and assigned a different musical part, vocals, drums, bass, and melody, each with its own LED color glowing underneath the grille.
Designer: Geonwoo Kang
The system uses AI to split a track into four stems and send each to a different speaker, so one cube carries the vocal, another the drums, another the bass, and another the melody. The LEDs on each unit glow in a unique color, making it easy to see which part is where. This spatial mapping of sound means the mix becomes something you can see and point at, not just hear as a single stereo image coming from two speakers.
The baton-shaped controller is the main interface. In Maestro Mode, you twist a dial to enter a state where the default buttons are locked, zand you control speakers by pointing and gesturing. A quick left-right wave skips tracks, a slow up-down motion adjusts volume with LED brightness as feedback, and drawing a circle pauses or resumes playback, with all LEDs turning off or on to confirm what just happened.
Remote Control Mode lets the same baton behave more like a traditional remote. You still point it at a specific speaker, but now you press buttons instead of waving. This lets you fine-tune or mute individual units without the full theatricality of Maestro Mode. The two modes together acknowledge that sometimes you want to perform, and sometimes you just want to nudge the volume down on the drums without getting up.
The main speaker takes its form from an orchestra podium and acts as the system’s brain. It handles the main bass that anchors the center and runs the AI that assigns parts to each satellite. A small display shows the current mode, battery levels, and which part each speaker is playing, so you can glance down and see the state of your orchestra without opening an app.
Sound Maestro pokes at the idea that home audio can be more than invisible boxes and playlists. By giving each part of a song its own physical presence and letting you conduct with a baton instead of a touchscreen, it makes listening into a small performance. Whether or not you want to wave a stick in your living room, the idea that a speaker system could ask you to point, gesture, and conduct instead of just pressing play feels like a surprisingly theatrical take on what modular audio might become.
The post Sound Maestro Splits Songs Into 4 Speakers You Conduct With a Baton first appeared on Yanko Design.