Show HN: I built a synthesizer based on 3D physics
So far I am only selling it direct on my website, which seems to be working well. I hope to turn it into a sustainable business, and ideally I'd have enough revenue to hire folks to help with it. So far it's been 99% a solo project, with (awesome) contractors brought in for some of the stuff that I'm bad at, like the 3D models and making instrument presets/videos.
The official launch announcement video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYX_eeNVIEU
But if you REALLY want to see what it can do, check out what Mick Cormick did with in on the first day: https://x.com/Mick_Gordon/status/1918146487948919222
I've kept a fairly detailed developer log about my progress on the project since October 2023, which might be of interest to the hardcore technical folks here: https://anukari.com/blog/devlog
I also gave a talk at Audio Developer Conference 2023 (ADC23) that goes deep into a couple of the problems I solved for Anukari: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb8b1SYy73Q
As a programmer and former physicist, I'm fascinated. As a musician, I'm not sure. At the moment, my feeling is that your landing page primarily addresses me as a programmer/physicist, and I'll definitely try it. But if you also want to sell this to musicians, what is really missing are more complex sound examples, like a tour of the existing presets and how you can manipulate them. There is your introduction video, but to be perfectly honest, the sounds you feature there do not really impress me. From what I can hear there, it very much sounds like the already existing physical modeling plugins, for instance AAS Chromaphone, and I already have plenty of those and they are much easier to use (also, their product page is a good example on how to sell a product to musicians). I can see of course that your VST allows me to dive much deeper into the weeds, and as a programmer/physicist I'm interested, but the musician in me is doubtful if the invested work will be worth with.
Again, this looks awesome, and I really hope you can make this into a business, so please see my critique above as encouragement.
https://anukari.com/blog/devlog/waste-makes-haste
If anyone can put me in touch directly with an OS/Metal person at Apple it would be EXTREMELY helpful. I've had limited success so far.
The landing page needs an immediate audio visual demo. Not an embedded YouTube but a videojs or similar. Low friction get the information of what it sounds and feels like immediately.
My 2 cents
There are a few of us :)
This synth is very cool. Highly original. Kudos.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animusic , https://www.animusic.com/ , https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=animusic , https://www.youtube.com/@julianlachniet9036/videos
I'm several videos in and totally hooked, thank you for sharing. This would be an amazing interactive music app in VR, both to perform and to record trippy music videos.
Most of them are on youtube.
Also, even though I said I wouldn't use it, something that would be nice is a master volume, maybe I missed it. I often use VSTs standalone and being able to change the volume without messing with the preset would make it a bit easier to use.
Definitely the most interesting synth I've ever seen.
Not yet sure how to really do it, but one concept I like from NI plugins is that you have multiple keyboard zones: one zone is for notes, others are e.g. for patterns or styles. Imagine a guitar where one zone is for the chord type and tone, another for the striking pattern...
The challenge here is probably the resonance algo for multiple systems based on multiple notes... Maybe the piano concept would be handy here... imagine instead of having 3 strings like on the piano the instrument to be one system for each key... that excite each other via air or direct resonance points... the systems should be automatically tuned based on one reference system (e.g. using automatic string length or tension scaling)
Anyway, amazing work and having it on GPU allows this really to scale.
Remind me of Korg's Berlin branch with their Phase8 instrument: https://korg.berlin/ . Life imitates art imitates life :)
I highly support and encourage this. Is there a way I could contribute to Anukari at all (I'm a physicist by day)? These kinds of advancements are the stuff I would live for! However I should stay rooted in what's possible or helpful: I'm not sure if this is open-source for example. As long as I could help, I'm game.
I was using the demo just now: the sounds you get out of this are actually better than I expected! And I see what you meant in the videos about intuitive editing, rather than abstract.
Although, I was often hitting 100% CPU with some presets, with the sound glitching accordingly. So I could experiment only in part. I'm on an M1 Pro; initially I set 128 buffer sample size in Ableton but most presets were glitching, I then set to 2048 just to check for improvement, which it did, nevertheless it does seem a bit high. Maybe my audio settings are incorrect? I can give more info later if it helps you.
Long answer: I've written a fair bit about this on my devlog. You might check out these tags:
https://anukari.com/blog/devlog/tags/gpu https://anukari.com/blog/devlog/tags/optimization
Although I wonder if mathematically it’s the same thing …
Congratulations!!
https://i5.walmartimages.com/seo/McCormick-Pure-Ground-Black...
Another physical audio simulation I like is the engine sound simulator made by AngeTheGreat: https://youtu.be/RKT-sKtR970?si=t193nZwh-jaSctQM
Did you find it more interesting doing this or the physics simulation ?
Have you considered simulating strings or moving air too ?
RE strings/air, I have thought about it, but only a little! Down the road I really want to explore more physics objects. It's very fun to think about how I'd integrate strings into the world, especially w.r.t. how they'd interact and connect with the masses. It seems like there could possibly be some very cool ways to do it.
- If I buy once can I run it on both my Windows desktop and MacBook travel computer?
- If so, are files compatible between them?
- What are GPU requirements on Windows? I’m sure it scales, but is a 3080 overkill or not enough?
I assume files are compatible, presets are the same on both MacOS and Windows.
Congratulations on the launch, and best of luck!
What's odd is that I hear the glitches in in Firefox and in the file downloaded with yt-dlp, but not in Chromium. Is Google serving me bad audio on purpose?
Correction: some videos also do have glitchs on Chromium.
I'm very rusty at music, but I always had a big soft spot for unusual/unique synthesis methods. I'll be buying a copy as soon as I'm back at a desktop system :).
Even "bad" ideas. I had an idea in the mid 90s about mass internet surveillance. But then I thought it would be so disgusting that noone would do it. I was naive.
Congrats on the hard work and the launch, in any case!
Edit: I see you have a demo mode, that's great! Exactly what I was looking for
I think that's the real key to this stuff: what makes these things actually sound good?
edit: a hn thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19961812
If this doesn't make sense it's entirely my fault for explaining it poorly -- I really want to write this up properly with some diagrams because it's a surprising thing and quite interesting, at least to me.
(BTW that demo has other things going on like mic isotropy and analog oscillators attached to vibrate two of the masses, so my spring tangent is not the only thing producing harmonics.)
... but I wanted to say that even with all of the glowing feedback, US$70 for a beta v1 soft synth is a big enough ticket that it will be off-putting to some and difficult to afford for others. Yes, there are many [much] more expensive virtual instruments, and this occupies a pretty unique space. But if you're open to feedback, this is my initial gut reaction.
One thing I am surprised by is that there's no mention of VR/AR ambitions. When I fantasize about 3D instruments, I do so in the context of wanting to interact with them in a space I inhabit. Does this speak to you as well?
https://anukari.com/support/faq#custom-skyboxes https://anukari.com/support/faq#custom-skins
AFAIK nobody has attempted this yet, so the write-up might not be perfect. If you try it, let me know how it goes!
The battery-less medium is something we do desperately try to mimic
I wouldn't go so far, apart from this point the landing page is excellent.
Still, awesome work!
CLAP: I'm using the JUCE framework for plugin integrations, which doesn't currently support CLAP. But their roadmap says that the next major version will support CLAP, and I will definitely implement that in Anukari. Not sure when JUCE 9 comes out though, it could be a while.
It seems like vst problems with WINE always comes down to issues with license auth and graphics libs.
It works quite well, but it's also reasonable to wait for official framework support.
Another idea. What if you make a circular string and attach 1 or more oscillators at random points? Same idea as above, but more symmetric. This "sound ring" instrument may produce unreal sounds.
If your computer meets the system requirements, you could always install the free demo and build this sound ring instrument to find out! Building these kinds of weird ideas and seeing what happens is my favorite thing to do with it.
Then I don’t have to make a buying decision up front - I can get it on my computer and running first in all cases.
Is the simulation deterministic?
The animations have some subtlety, but the basic idea is that they all to from t=0 to t=1, and then Anukari drives that t parameter. So for example, the mallet would go from resting at t=0 to fully extended at t=1, and Anukari will animate it at the right speed from 0, up to some value based on the velocity, back to zero.
Some of the objects are cyclic, like the spinning oscillators, and those also use the t=0 to t=1 convention, but require that the animation is seamless (so it looks identical at t=0 and t=1, but does whatever you want in between).
I'm not aware of anyone fully customizing the 3D stuff yet, so the instructions may be a bit rough. If you try it, feel free to contact me at evan@anukari.com or on discord and I'd be happy to answer questions.
This is potentially new to producers. Tell them why they should care first.
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I find it hysterically funny, but at the same time, it really shows what this synth is capable of.
Excellent!
Boo
You can take it a stage further and model networks of complex shapes like metal plates. That gets even more interesting because you get multiple resonant modes.
In the limit you could use finite element modelling to create precise simulations of acoustic instruments - like all of the strings in a piano, all of the dampers, the resonator, and the wooden enclosure.
But that's a brute force way to do it, and there isn't nearly enough compute available to make it happen in real time. (You might be able to do it on a supercomputer. I'm not aware of anyone's who's tried.)