An Audio Interface For WOMEN That Nobody Asked For – Female Musicians Respond

The recently announced Mirror interface from Midiplus is so ridiculous that I’m trying to decide if I’m being trolled. An “Audio interface specially designed for females”, the Mirror is designed to look like a makeup compact, and has a ring light and mirror (as the name implies), because, you know, women need to look at themselves ALL THE TIME, EVEN WHILE MAKING ART.

Even as the copy on their website makes it very difficult to take it seriously, (“By the research of cosmetics, luxuries, jewellery (sic), color sets, visual, texture, and female ergonomics, we endue (sic) it calm, mysterious and grace. “Discard the common thinking flow”, “Enjoy the waves of sweet interaction”), it’s impossible to not be seriously horrified that such a thing exists. It’s so ludicrously absurd that such a thing would make it from inception in some boardroom, through R&D, all the way to market without someone, literally any one woman along the way being like “Uh yeah, we’re not doing this, nobody wants, needs, or asked for this.”

It’s a Japanese brand, and there could be some cultural references that I’m missing that makes such a silly thing make sense, but that seems a bit unlikely.

I’m not in the business of getting outraged over everything or being insulted for people who are not myself, and I certainly don’t speak for or represent women, but this is just so comically misogynist that it really needs the point-and-laugh treatment. Some musician friends of mine had the following to say about it:

The takeaway is that this company thinks that women are shallow enough to want a vanity product integrated into their work gear. I mean, I sure as shit take pictures of myself when I’m in the studio (#todaysoffice and other terrible things) but even if you take a selfie every day that you’re working on music, this is complete fucking overkill.

Not to mention the implication that every other interface is a penis-only situation. “Sorry sweetie, this is a man console, do you have your lady one? You probably left it in your purse with your tampons, it’s fine, we’ll take it from here.”

I’m sure they had good intentions (like, the intention to make money) but I think a couple sessions’ worth of focus groups with actual human people would have kept this off shelves for sure.

There is, of course, the possibility that this is one big troll of a website. But that’s a pretty big effort to go to for a joke.