Where sound finds its
furthest orbit.
Phonon is an audio-visual 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.
Encounter
seed 1 · approach · separation 7.0
40k stars, solved live
That is not a video. It is a restricted N-body simulation running in this page: forty thousand stars, each one a test particle moving in the tidal field of two galactic cores, integrated with a leapfrog scheme every frame. The tails are not drawn, they are a result. Move any control and the encounter re-solves from the first step.
240 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. A handful are still marked beta, and we say so in the app.
The World Is Your Instrument
Most synths give you an oscillator and a filter and ask you to shape a sound. These give you a world: a globe, a landscape, a curve, a solid, generated from a seed, and the sound is read off it. Playing is a matter of where you are in that world, so the panel is not an illustration of the instrument. It is the instrument, showing you the exact place you are currently listening to.
- PlanetA flock crosses a procedurally generated globe, and the terrain beneath its flight path is the waveform. Steer the flock and you are editing the sound.
- NamibWave terrain synthesis. A fractal landscape is evaluated live and your note reads a closed circle around it; the height under that circle is the wave.
- Attractor StringA segment of a strange attractor played as a physical string. Every note picks a different stretch of the curve, so two notes a tone apart are genuinely two instruments.
- SkerryA window on a fractal coastline, and the window is moving. The waveform is a staircase whose steps are the directions the coast turns, and travelling along it changes the ground under a held note, so a chord never settles.
- CoralA coral grown from a seed, whose tips are its partials. The note unfurls outward from the holdfast as the wave reaches the far branches.
- VillarceauEvery note is four oscillators whose balance is a point travelling on a sphere. The chord inverts and re-inverts forever without ever getting louder or quieter.
- RomanescoA cutting plane slices a fractal solid, and the outline of that slice is the wavetable your notes are played through.
- MengerA tunnel bored through a fractal sponge and struck like an object. Where you strike it decides which of its chambers you wake.
This one runs
in your browser.
Planet, the actual instrument, ported out of the desktop app and running in this page. The flock flies over a world the app baked, and the ground beneath it is the waveform you can see and hear. Nothing here is a recording.
A live synthesizer, not a recording. Runs in this page.
The flock flies over a world baked by the desktop app. The ground beneath it is the waveform.
Flagship Synths That Show Their Workings
Every flagship draws what it is doing. Not a decorative graphic bolted onto a knob panel: the live state of the engine, on the face, while it sounds. You can see which stage of the envelope the waveform has reached, which operators are routed where, where the cables run. When an instrument is deep enough to get lost in, being able to see it is the difference between a preset you scroll past and one you understand.
- CascadiaNinety exactly band-limited wavetable frames, with a different waveform for every envelope stage, so each note journeys down the falls.
- Shinjuku FMFour-operator FM with a continuous algorithm dial: the routing morphs between algorithms, so an operator can be half carrier and half modulator.
- GräfelfingAn 84HP modular rack inside a single module. Right-click the rails to add modules, then drag cables between jacks.
- MarianaThe deepest point in the rack. A clean mono sub that never erodes under a gritty, wide top, with a wobble engine that runs as a sequence rather than an automation chore.
- Mount EtnaGranular synthesis where the mountain provides the rock: grains dug from fifteen synthesized strata, with one dial morphing dormant shimmer through to chaos.
- Mesa VerdeSixty-four partials you draw as a sandstone skyline, kept alive by patterns travelling across the partial field. No filter: the spectrum is the filter.
- Big SurFold, don't filter. A complex oscillator driving a real multi-stage wavefolder, harmonics blooming upward instead of being carved away.
- JenaA microscope for one sample. The magnification dial takes it from whole, to sliced across the keys, to a grain cloud, to a frozen spectrum you can play.
- HardangerA string laboratory. The exciter morphs from felt hammer through plectrum to a real bow with friction that sings while you hold the note.
- LarsenAn operator standing in front of its own amplifier. Push the feedback and it crosses an edge where a clean sub-octave arrives underneath the note.
Modelled Down To The Component
Ten of Phonon's synths are not emulations of a sound. They are built from modelled components: transistors solved with the real device equation, diodes with theirs, a filter's feedback loop solved implicitly instead of approximated. The behaviour that makes analog hardware sound like analog hardware is not painted on afterwards; it falls out of the physics.
- ✓The loop is solved, not delayed. Five cores run Newton-Raphson every sample on the circuit's real nonlinear system, resonance path included. The usual shortcut is a one-sample delay in that feedback path, and it is exactly what detunes resonance and spoils self-oscillation.
- ✓Real device equations. Transistor stages are the Ebers-Moll large-signal solution at a physical thermal voltage of 25.85 mV. Shockley diodes. Koren triodes. Not curve-fitted saturators wearing the names.
- ✓Every unit is built slightly wrong. Each instance gets its own V/oct scale error and pitch offset, because two oscillators from one schematic never track identically, and that disagreement is most of what people mean by analog.
- ✓Drift has a cause. The exponential converter's scale really is q/kT, so it depends on die temperature, with a tempco control for how well the hardware cancels it. The saw core's reset discharge takes real microseconds, so the top octaves play flat, exactly as they do in hardware.
- ✓Tested against physics, not against taste. Four-pole rolloff. Self-oscillation at cutoff. A diode ladder with a lazier knee than a transistor ladder. A wavefolder whose evens arrive only with asymmetry, and never a DC pedestal.
Twenty Instruments, Measured Rather Than Modelled
Every other piano here derives its spectrum from a formula: a decay power law, a stiffness curve, a two-stage ratio. Each of those is a guess at the shape of a curve. These twenty instruments skip the guess. A real recording is analysed instead, every partial's exact frequency and how loud it is at twenty-one instants from the attack out to four seconds, and playback rebuilds the note one oscillator per partial. Nothing loops, because there is nothing to loop.
- ✓Not a sample library. No audio is played back. The analysis is played back, so a held note keeps evolving for as long as you hold it and no two notes are the same recording twice.
- ✓Frequencies are stored as ratios to each note's own fundamental. That reproduces the source instrument's inharmonicity, the exact way its strings refuse to be perfect, while leaving its tuning behind.
- ✓Velocity picks a different recording, not a quieter one. A cello leaned into is a different instrument from one played lightly, so the layers are measured takes rather than a volume curve. Fourteen strike strengths on one kick drum, four bow pressures on one cello.
- ✓Where analysis fails, the recording stays. A bow bite and a drum transient are phase, and no spectral method survives them, so the first 150 ms is kept as raw audio and the measured tone takes over behind it. Knowing which half of the note to measure is most of the work.
- ✓Sources are chosen by probe, not by paperwork. One upright piano looked better on every axis a file listing can show and lost on the measurement that matters: across its whole dynamic range its timbre moved 5 dB where the grand's moved 16. That is an instrument changing volume rather than colour, which is invisible in a directory and obvious in a spectrum.
Synthesized, Not Sampled. Over 70 Times.
Phonon does not ship a folder of one-shots for you to audition and run out of. It ships seventy-two drum synthesizers: kicks, snares, hats, cymbals, toms, hand percussion and whole machines, each one generating its sound rather than recalling it. The synths are the library, and that turns out to be the better trade in almost every direction.
- ✓A sample is one hit, forever. Round-robins run out and the ear finds the repeat. Nothing here repeats, because nothing here is a recording being played back.
- ✓They tune to the track. Move a kick's pitch, its length, the size of its body, until it sits under your bassline. On a sample you get EQ and a pitch shifter and an apology.
- ✓Built to be stacked. The answer to a thin kit is almost never one better drum, it is two drums glued together. These are designed in layering pairs and say so in their own tooltips: the mesh snare tells you to put a room snare under it, and the room snare tells you the same back.
- ✓Every parameter modulates. Sweep the decay across a fill, ride the noise band with velocity, sequence the pitch. A sample has one automatable parameter and it is volume.
- ✓Nothing to install, nothing to lose. A project that points at a sample folder rots the day that folder moves. These are code. The session opens the same in five years, on a machine that never had the library.
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 audio-visual DAW with full VST3 hosting, on Windows and macOS.
Windows and macOS
At a glance
Phonon specifications
| Platform | Windows · macOS |
|---|---|
| Plug-ins | Full VST3 hosting |
| Modules | 240 included · 85+ Blocks nodes |
| Modulation | 64 sample-accurate CV buses |
| Video export | H.264 + AAC MP4 · landscape & vertical |
| Scripting | Glyph (DSP) · GlyphVis (GLSL) |