We haven’t heard a lot from Greg Wieber, the original creator of PolyChord for some time, but now he’s brought us a new app called Meance. Personally I was a big fan of Polychord, but this seems to be a significant departure from what he was doing there.

Menace is an experimental synth oddity with a somewhat stark looking design. According to the app’s description:

“From the moment it’s triggered Menace goes off the rails – detuning and going out of phase as you slide your finger over the touch area. A single touch controls thirty voices – drag left and right to change their pitch; drag down to increase the chaos.”

Features:

  • 30 Saw or Square oscillators
  • Chaos control
  • Attack / Release envelope control
  • Ladder and Acid filter with Cutoff / Resonance control
  • Hectic live waveform visualizer
  • Freeform or quantized note input mode
  • MIDI input
  • Audiobus

What’s most interesting about this little iOS synth is that its’ built on the AudioKit framework. We’re starting to see quite a lot of new things built there, and it shows just how versatile a framework it is.

Menace is on the app store and costs $4.99