Sonicrama is a wavetable synth whose sound draws real Chladni figures, live. Clips, stills, logos and boilerplate in one zip — no form, no email, free to use. Making a video instead? Ask for an NFR licence below and play it yourself.
Every clip and still is a real-time capture from the running instrument. No renders, no post.
Copy and paste at will. The same text ships inside the kit as press-notes.txt.
Sonicrama is a wavetable synthesizer with a real-time physical cymatics engine, built by solo developer Paolo Zappalà under the AcusMagic brand. A GPU engine solves the modal equation of a vibrating plate — Bessel mode shapes, Faraday-wave dispersion for the liquid vessel — and drives 400,000 particles with the audio, live. For the sand plate, modal frequencies and spatial scale are physically exact, cross-checked against published measurements; the liquid vessel is a declared macro-lens. It is not a visualizer inspired by cymatics.
Same note, different plate, different figure — the shape belongs to the system, not to the number. That is the part every viral cymatics video gets wrong, and the part this instrument was built to show.
The synth underneath: four oscillators, per-key meta-tuning across all 128 keys, .scl/.tun import and export, a different tuning table per oscillator, unison ×7, a modulation matrix, four Bézier envelopes, a multi-mode filter.
Formats: AU · VST3 · CLAP · standalone, macOS 11+, Universal 2. Windows planned.
Price: €89 intro until October 4, then €129. Perpetual licence, one payment, no subscription.
Release: September 13, 2026
Contact: Paolo Zappalà — hello@acusmagic.com
Sonicrama is written in Rust. CLAP is the master format; the VST3 and AU builds are generated from the CLAP itself, via clap-wrapper. The dependency tree is licence-gated at build time — nothing copyleft can enter it — and every shipped third-party notice is MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD, ISC or zlib.
No transfer link that expires, no form in front of it. Filenames describe their contents, so they still make sense in your media library next month.
Missing something? A specific frequency, a different plate, another resolution, a longer take: hello@acusmagic.com — I render it myself, usually the same day.
From the kit: the third and fourth frames are the same 256.87 Hz tone on a 21 cm and an 18 cm plate — two different figures. That is the story.
If you review instruments or make content around synths, tuning or generative visuals, leave your email and I'll send a full NFR licence. No expiry, no embargo — and no obligation to be kind about it.
Requests land in my inbox, not a PR queue. Expect a personal reply, usually within a day.
Sonicrama is one person — me. For interviews I'm glad to go deep: the research behind the plate, the microtonal system, why an instrument should show you its own physics. And if you want to know where the simulation still diverges from a real plate — that's my favourite question.
— Paolo · AcusMagic
