Ninety-plus years after Friedrich Trautwein built the first Trautonium in Berlin, its strange, cello-like voice is getting a very modern reboot. Sound Workshop has fully funded the Flexur T2, a standalone expressive synthesizer that trades a conventional keyboard for two continuous touch bars — and it ships with native MPE output built in.

What Is a Trautonium, and Why Does It Matter for Expression?

The original Trautonium generated pitch not through discrete keys but through a resistive wire: press down at any point along the wire and you get a continuous glide to that pitch, with volume controlled by how hard you press. It was one of the earliest instruments to treat pitch and dynamics as continuous, gestural parameters rather than fixed steps — which makes it, in retrospect, a spiritual ancestor of everything MPE controllers are trying to do today. Composer Oskar Sala used a descendant of the instrument, the Mixtur-Trautonium, to create the famous bird-like screeches in Hitchcock's The Birds.

Sound Workshop's take, the Flexur T2, keeps that core idea — two floating touch bars that respond to both position and pressure — while wrapping it in a modern synth engine and modern connectivity. The company describes the resulting sound and playing feel as "a Cello crossed with a MiniMoog in the spice mines of Arrakis," which gives a sense of both the fretless, vocal quality of the bars and the analog-flavored engine underneath.

Built for Both Modular Rigs and MPE Setups

What makes the Flexur T2 relevant to the MPE world specifically is its output stage. Alongside dedicated CV outputs for pitch, gate, push, and envelope — for players who want to patch it directly into a modular or semi-modular analog rig — it includes USB-C and TRS MIDI input and output with full MPE support. That means the continuous position and pressure data the bars generate can be sent as per-note pitch bend and aftertouch to any MPE-compatible plugin or hardware synth, the same way an Osmose or a Continuum would.

It's a smart design choice: an instrument whose entire physical interface is built around continuous gesture is a natural fit for a MIDI standard designed to carry exactly that kind of data without flattening it into a single global channel.

Funding and Availability

The Flexur T2 launched as a pre-order campaign and found an enthusiastic audience quickly — Sound Workshop reported the run fully funded and 135 units sold within five days, with total pledges passing $186,000 as of late June. The instrument is currently in prototype status, with pre-orders open at $1,380 via Sound Workshop's store. Shipping estimates are wide — Sound Workshop is quoting a window of 6 to 24 months, which is fairly typical for a small manufacturer bringing a new hardware design from prototype to production.

Coverage from Synthtopia and MusicTech both note that the instrument occupies an unusual niche: it's neither a keyboard-shaped MPE controller like the Osmose nor a flat touch surface like the ROLI Seaboard or LinnStrument, but a third physical paradigm entirely, closer in spirit to a theremin or an electric cello than anything currently sold as an MPE product.

Why This Matters Beyond the Novelty Factor

It's easy to file instruments like the Flexur T2 under "interesting curiosity" and move on, but its existence says something useful about where expressive MIDI is heading. As MPE has matured from a niche protocol into something DAWs and mainstream plugins support out of the box, it's opened the door for smaller manufacturers to build genuinely unconventional physical interfaces without needing to invent their own proprietary communication protocol — they can lean on MPE and know that Bitwig, Ableton, Logic, and a growing list of software instruments will understand the data they're sending.

For players who have found keyboard-based MPE controllers a bit too familiar, or who are drawn to instruments with a more physical, acoustic-adjacent playing technique, the Flexur T2 is one of the more distinctive additions to the expressive-controller landscape in 2026 — a reminder that MPE was always meant to be about the gesture, not the shape of the hardware sending it.