Anima Synthesizer

Anima is a physical modeling instrument. Sound happens the way it happens in the physical world: a breath excites an object, and the object rings out into a room. That is the whole interface, left to right: ENERGY, OBJECT, ROOM.

The object is a modal resonator: twenty-four coupled resonances per voice whose frequencies, loudness, and decay follow physical laws you bend with the controls. Make it wood, glass, or metal. Stretch its partials from strings through piano wire into bells. Touch it at the edge, or hollow it out at the center. Blow at it, press it, strike it with a mallet that hits harder the higher you raise it. Push Inertia far enough and the note ignites and sings on its own breath.

The controls are bold glyphs, shapes whose form is the value. No numbers at rest: the panel is a picture of the current sound, and it glides into a new shape when you load a preset. On an iPad the three sections share the screen; on an iPhone they sit side by side, a swipe apart, with the ribbon always under your fingers. Every control is easy to grasp and none of them stop at what the label says; finding what else a knob can do is part of the instrument.

The ROOM is a morphable space: Size sets the echo's time, Regen goes all the way into self-oscillation, and Blur melts the repeats into a wash. Delay at one end, reverb at the other, one knob between them.

Because every mode frequency is computed from the note, nothing ties Anima to the usual twelve pitches: it plays any tuning an MPE controller can send. Anima is the companion instrument to Hexatone; route Hexatone's MPE into it and per-note microtuning just works, with no configuration.

- Standalone app and AUv3 instrument (AUM, Logic, GarageBand, Cubasis, Loopy Pro), on iPhone and iPad; your sound saves with the session
- MPE with zero setup: per-note pressure is breath (press into a note and it can ignite), and the slide axis goes wherever you route it, any mix of the ENERGY and OBJECT controls, per note
- Every control answers a fixed MIDI CC, so any hardware controller reaches the whole instrument with no mapping; pick a MIDI channel in the app, or play on all of them
- Sustain pedal (CC64), MIDI Program Change, Glide, and 1 to 64 voices (at 1 it is a true mono synth)
- A ribbon keyboard for true microtonal play (multitouch, per-finger glide, Hold to build chords, Snap or Loose), and a piano with properly wide black keys when you want the familiar
- 55 factory presets in banks, including packs by Red Sky Lullaby and Hoavi; save your own, or copy any sound as text and send it to a friend
- Undo and redo for every gesture, and the full manual lives inside the app
- Collects no data; nothing leaves your device

One purchase, iPhone and iPad. Headphones or a real speaker recommended: the low end of the breath is real.