Where sound finds its
furthest orbit.
Phonon is a generative DAW where harmony, modular synthesis, video and real-time visuals orbit a single idea. Compose the rules then watch your song come to life.
Generative, not generated. Phonon uses no AI to write music for you (no LLMs and no agents). Music is for humans and by humans. Its music-theory-driven algorithms simply give you faster ways to build the music you already hear in your head.
230+ modules. Right out of the box.
Phonon ships a full studio's worth of building blocks: subtractive and FM synthesizers, multisample and granular samplers, effects, filters, sequencers, drum machines, MIDI tools and more. Every one drops straight onto a track and wires into everything else.
One key. Every part agrees.
At the center of Phonon sits the Harmonic Engine, a hub that decides the chord under every beat and broadcasts it to the whole session. Arpeggios, pads, followers and quantizers are all wired into it, so every part of your song can respond to the harmony in real time.
- ✓Banks & Forms: build progressions as song sections, then re-arrange them as A·A·B·A structure without rewriting a note.
- ✓15 chord types from triads to Maj9 / Min9 / Add9, placed on any scale degree across Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Harmonic & Melodic minor and more.
- ✓Chord-change broadcast retriggers envelopes, swaps arpeggio patterns and re-quantizes melodies the instant the harmony moves.
- ✓Smart followers: the Harmonic Follower, Chord Vamp and Harmonic Quantizer always stay inside the current chord.
Patch your own instrument from scratch.
We built Blocks, a modular synthesis lab that lives inside any track. Imagine a Eurorack on a canvas, with 85+ specialized nodes ready to wire into wild new sounds. Drag, connect, and play: the graph sorts itself for tight, per-sample feedback with no cycles and no block-rate smear.
- ✓Real synthesis: wavetable oscillators, FM operators, Karplus-Strong strings and a Waveguide Tube with flute, clarinet & brass modes.
- ✓Generative brains: a Music-Thing-style Turing Machine, Euclidean rhythms and a Harmonic Quantizer that snaps every note to the Harmonic Engine chord.
- ✓Logic & math: flip-flops, comparators, trig, exp/log and map-range let you build envelopes, VCAs and ring-mod from primitives.
- ✓Script nodes let you drop in custom DSP, and patches save as reusable Full Patches.
Modulation that breathes for hours.
The Control Rack is Phonon's hardware-inspired modulation engine: a stack of CV modules writing into 64 sample-accurate buses. Map any knob to a bus and watch your whole mix evolve, from a one-knob morph to a 17-minute glacial swell.
- ✓LFO · VLFO · Audio-Rate Osc: modulation from 0.001 Hz drifts up to 5 kHz FM, all beat-syncable to musical divisions.
- ✓Maths: a dual function generator with rise/fall, cycle mode and sum/difference/OR outputs, straight from the modular world.
- ✓Generative sequencers: Repeater, Stochastic, the polyrhythmic Zularic Repetitor and a Cartesian 2-D scanner.
- ✓One Knob nudges all 64 buses at once; text automation (
m0 cv0, m8 cv1) paints song-length curves.
Any sound, sliced, warped, and in key.
Drop in a WAV (or MP3) and Phonon takes it from there. A whole family of samplers plays it back, warps it to your tempo, repitches it without the chipmunk effect, and can even follow the chord under the beat. Sampling that stays smooth, however hard you push it.
- ✓Slice, warp, & shift fast: an easy-to-use sampler that allows fast sample selection and exploration.
- ✓Pull out the drums: an automated drum-clip to MIDI module that turns your favorite clips into usable MIDI signals.
- ✓Repitch cleanly: formant-preserving pitch shift moves a sample in semitones and keeps its character intact.
- ✓Harmonize to the song: our sampler detects each region's pitch and follows the incoming note, so sampled material lands right in the Harmonic Engine's chord.
A GPU visual synth, wired to your sound.
The Visual Graph is a node-based, real-time GLSL engine for building visuals, and video is just another source in the same graph. Generators, transforms, blends and effects all run as live shaders. Every node hears the music through lows, mids, highs and beats, and you choose how the picture reacts to your song.
- ✓Generators: Fractal, Plasma, Voronoi, Metaballs, Superformula, Lissajous and more, all procedural.
- ✓Transforms & FX: Kaleidoscope, Tunnel, Feedback loops, Bloom, Chromatic Aberration, Glitch and Beat Blend.
- ✓Video, first-class: drop a clip on the timeline, lock it to the beat with frame-accurate seeking and variable-rate stretch, grade it, and export the whole performance to H.264 + AAC MP4.
- ✓Sources: pull in the Audio & CV buses, a Blocks In bridge or a GlyphVis script node.
- ✓Auto-layout & topo-sort keep the graph readable; a Screen node master-grades the final image.
Want to code it? Write the sound. Write the vision.
Glyph is a new musical scripting language baked into Phonon for building instruments and effects that run per-sample with zero allocation. Its twin, GlyphVis, borrows the same syntax and transpiles to GLSL, so one mental model covers both your DSP and your shaders.
- ✓Glyph:
in()/out()ports, state vars, delay buffers,mtof/ftomand inlineparam()sliders. Real-time safe, no GC. - ✓GlyphVis:
bass(),mids(),treble()plus 256-bin spectrum, fbm/noise/hsv helpers, and bus reads from your Blocks patch. - ✓Built-in presets to learn from: Raindrops, Acid Bass and Soft Pad for sound, then Audio Rings, Neon Grid, Pulse Tunnel and Shatter for visuals.
// random pitched drops (pentatonic)
float density = in("Density");
if (timer >= nextDrop) {
dropFreq = mtof(60.0 + noteIdx * 2.0);
dropEnv = 1.0;
}
dropEnv *= 0.9992; // decay
out("Left", sin(dropPhase*6.283) * dropEnv);It’s woven together seamlessly.
Every system in Phonon talks to the others. The harmony feeds the Blocks. The Control Rack modulates everything. A 64-channel Blocks → Visual bridge lets a synth voice drive a shader, so when you play, the picture answers back.
Set your own rules.
Let the music orbit them.
Phonon is a standalone generative DAW with full VST3 hosting, on Windows and macOS.
Windows and macOS