About Us
Like a number of recent ventures, Maponos was conceived when the pandemic hit.
Founders Matteo Magli and Cristiano Calaresu met a few years earlier, when both were completing their studies at the Conservatory of Pesaro, in the Italian region of Marche: Matteo in the Tuba program, and Cristiano in the Jazz Orchestra Arranging and Conducting program.
After those years, they went their separate ways: Matteo pursued a career as an accomplished musician, focusing on orchestral work with his tuba.
After working for some foreign clients, Cristiano began exploring sound engineering: mixing, mastering, and the digital music world in general.
Unaware that the other was in the city, both had ended up living in Torino during the same period and ran into each other by chance in the city center. They promised to meet again and catch up.
In April 2020, during one of their conversations in Turin, Matteo shared his frustration: there was no good tool to help musicians prepare orchestral excerpts, which are fundamental to classical training. He envisioned something that would give students more context and awareness of what happens around their instrument when playing in an orchestra.
This is especially relevant in today’s world, where conservatories and music institutes increasingly lack the funds to maintain orchestras for their students.
The pandemic added another layer to this challenge, making the need to solve such a problem even more urgent.
Matteo’s frustration sparked Cristiano’s creativity. As a self-described tech enthusiast, he began thinking of a solution that could leverage new technologies. It seemed surprising that such a problem still existed in the digital age, yet it still affected students and musicians of all ages around the world.
And so Maponos was born. Over the next few years, they hit countless milestones: insights, mistakes, beta testing, initial funding, feedback, and improvements, with plenty of deeply discouraging moments along the way.
But Matteo and Cristiano always rolled up their sleeves, constantly refining, rethinking, adjusting, and polishing their work. After all that effort, the Maponos app has finally launched and is now available.
