Mutator: Mute Your iPhone...With a Twist

Recall the shock, heartbreak and the wholesale loss of your faith in humanity when you found out that the mute switch on the side of your iPhone didn’t actually completely mute all of the sounds to come out of your iPhone.

What if I told you that inserting a pair of headphones into your iPhone’s headphone jack and then cutting off the earbuds would actually mute almost all of the sounds to come out of your iPhone? And then what if I told you that instead of carrying around a janky, snipped pair of headphones all day, you could use something far more elegant?

The Mutator aims to be that far more elegant something. It’s basically an inexpensive pyramid-shaped nubbin that you keep plugged into your iPhone’s headphone jack at all times. Twist the pyramid in one direction, and almost all sounds are muted; twist it in another direction, and almost all sounds are unmuted. Simple as that.

According to the product’s Kickstarter page, the Mutator will silence the following:

• Video sound
• Music
• App sounds
• Siri
• Text and message tones
• Mail and calendar alerts
• Web audio
• Camera shutter sounds

It will not, however, mute alarms that you’ve manually set using the Clock app, sounds generated while in the Settings menu (choosing a new ring tone, for instance) and it won’t mute your phone’s ringer unless you’ve set the iPhone’s mute switch to mute.

As for an Android version, the Mutator isn’t necessarily iPhone-specific. The product creator suggests sticking a pair of headphones into your Android phone and seeing what happens:

We believe it will silence a lot of sounds but it really depends on the OS version, carrier customizations, and phone model.

If you want to get an idea for how it will work for your device you can try plugging in a set of headphones. Mutator will work as well as headphones to mute sounds emitted by the phone’s speakers.

The product is raising funding on Kickstarter and has a little over three weeks to go in its campaign. More than half of the $24,000 goal has been met already, so it’s looking pretty good that this thing will go into production.