If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: manipulating sound presets should be as intuitive and powerful as regulating plasma coolant flow to the antimatter injector on a warp drive nacelle.
I mean, knobs? How quaint.
COSMOSƒ is a graphical morphing engine for sound, a standalone synthesizer with a wild, sci-fi interface. You can actually set up polar coordinates and navigate sounds through a sphere, in three dimensions. The sound engine is all internal, but looks like a lot of fun. (For more of this sort of thing, see the excellent, free and open source IanniX, which can route events to other apps. Each is unique – and, I suspect, we’ll see more and more designs take on visual interfaces in new ways.)
Watch a demo with some very wild sounds:
Just reading the product description is trippy:
Stochastic morphing with distribution range for altering the morphing position, speed and interpolation control.
Built-in mathematical functions to automatically and precisely move the morphing pointer in the space.
Precise audio rate parameter update with the possibility of reaching amazing morphing speeds (44100times a second!)
turns Cosmosƒ into a super oscillator by accumulating up to 4 different presets in heterogeneous micro event mixing mode prior to the morphing phase.
It delivers an unheard medium by reaching the untouched points of the sonic universe..
The software is the work of Sinan Bökesoy, built in OpenFrameworks (C++ creative coding environment) for OS X and Windows.
89 € for the synth, but a demo version is available.
http://www.sonic-lab.com/software/cosmos-f/