Vascular - Tactile Synth

Vascular is an electroacoustic instrument you grow rather than program. There is no rack, no patch cable and no preset list. There is a canvas. Tap it and a voice appears, drawn at random from a palette of synthesis families and given a character of its own. Hold that voice and tap beside it, and an effect grows there, already wired. Hold a node and touch another to connect them. The picture on the screen is the signal routing, the instrument and the performance surface, all at once.

Every node is alive, and each keeps breathing, so nothing you build sits perfectly still. Press a node briefly to scatter its settings around its family's character. Double tap it for a rhythmic gate on the session's grid. Open its sheet to reach its controls, or draw it a new modulator with one key. Drag a node across the field and its stereo position follows.

ANGIOGENESIS

Hold one key and the organism takes over its own growth. The nodes set off wandering across the field, each at its own pace, and the picture moves with the sound, because a node's place on the screen is its place in the stereo image. Behind the drift, the organism mutates: it rewires the vessels between nodes, grows new processors around your voices, prunes the ones nothing feeds, and redraws what it keeps. It never removes a voice you placed and never touches a microphone. Hold for a second and a half and it latches, flashing, and goes on searching after your hand has left. Tap it once and everything glides back to the exact canvas you left, over a return time you set. Or keep what it found. The rate of mutation is yours to set, and the search paces itself by what your device can carry, so it grows an organism the hardware can play.

WHAT IT IS MADE OF

Dozens of synthesis families, from the plain to the strange: subtractive and FM voices, a full DX7 with sixteen thousand patches, additive clusters of forty partials, wave terrain, pulsar synthesis, Xenakis's dynamic stochastic synthesis, Casio-style phase distortion, granular and spectral engines, physical models of strings and rings, a sixteen-oscillator supersaw, sampled acoustic instruments that write their own melodic loops in the session's key, drums, a 303, and a family that plays your own performance back at you in grains. And the microphone, so anything can be played into it.

More than fifty processors, from filters and distortion through delays, combs, phasing, diffusion and reverb, to spectral freezing, convolution with the signal's own past, pitch tracking and harmony, vowels, spectral delays that pull a chord apart one partial at a time, and transformations from the Composers Desktop Project's vocabulary.

PLAYING IT

- Guided paths, for when you would rather be led: a compass that keeps what is offered, by hand or by angiogenesis, within a chosen territory.
- A clock. Every rhythmic node sits on one grid at the session's tempo, and each clocked source can take its own division of it.
- Twenty-six scales across four traditions, so melodic nodes and transpositions stay in key.
- A gesture looper, which is angiogenesis played by hand: what you do to the canvas is kept and given back, layer over layer, each layer its own length.
- Thirty-two pattern slots for the whole organism, morphed into over a time you choose.
- Sessions that save the canvas, the settings and the key together.
- Undo and redo, forty-eight steps deep, for every way a node can come or go.
- A recorder for takes, kept in the app to play, rename and share.
- A transport that stops the players and lets the tails ring out.

AS A PLUGIN

Vascular is also an AUv3 instrument. Load it in AUM, Loopy Pro, Logic or any host that takes Audio Units, and the same canvas plays inside your session.

MADE FOR HANDS

Landscape, full-screen, and played with fingers. The keys sit along the top of the screen, out of the way of the hand that is playing. It is an instrument to be held.