Each of the 128 keys can carry its own oscillators, wavetables, tuning and effects, and a physics engine draws whatever you play, sixty times a second. Made for musicians who build their own sounds and want their releases to look like them.
Keys that each carry a separate instrument, oscillators with their own effect routing, a scale per oscillator, and a plate that draws the physics of whatever you play.
Switch on META and each key gets four oscillators of its own, with their own waveform or wavetable (up to 512 different ones in a single patch), morph, tuning, unison, FM and AM, effect sends and even modulation depths.
The key itself becomes a separate instrument, so a bell at the bottom, a detuned saw stack in the middle and a dry sub under your thumb can live in one patch and play under one hand.
Each oscillator chooses which effects it goes through, and how much of it goes into each: VIVA, filter, tone, chorus, delay and reverb. Send the bell into the reverb, keep the sub completely dry and put echoes on a single voice, for the whole instrument or key by key.
And the picture follows the sound: keep an oscillator out of the reverb and its Lissajous curve draws no tail; let it skip the filter and its partials on the plate skip it too.
Set any key to any frequency. Import and export .scl and .tun files, choose a free root, give each of the four oscillators its own scale and let one follow another by a pure ratio. You can swap the whole tuning under a held chord without retriggering it.
The difference shows, too: a just interval closes the Lissajous curve, while a tempered one keeps it drifting.
A GPU engine solves the real modal physics of a vibrating plate from your audio, settling 400,000 grains of sand on its nodal lines. It also drives Faraday waves on a liquid, with caustics, and a Lissajous ribbon in 3D. Every frame is computed from your sound, sixty times a second.
Sand · Chladni figures, exact
Liquid · Faraday waves with caustics
Lissajous · a chord, drawn as a curve
On the sand plate the physics is exact — modal frequencies and spatial scale cross-checked against published Chladni-plate measurements: Tuan et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 137, 2113 (2015). Read the paper →
Record while you play, or bounce offline at full resolution with the audio already inside. What comes out is the physics of the sound you wrote: the video for the release and the cover for the single, from the same note.
The demo exports too, with a small engraved signature.
Day one. You'll have put a bell on one key and a dry sub on the next, sent the bell into the reverb and kept the sub out of it, and played both with one hand while the plate redrew itself for every note.
Week one. You'll have swapped a whole tuning under a held chord without a single retrigger, and given each oscillator its own scale.
Month one. You'll have released a track whose video was drawn by the sound itself, with nothing to commission and nothing to license.
Sonicrama is for people who make ambient, drone, modular or cinematic music, or anything where the timbre carries the piece; for anyone who has built a patch and wished the next key could be a different instrument; and for musicians who release their own work and end up making the visuals too.
Today that takes a synth, a tuning plugin and a visualizer side by side, with a picture that has nothing to do with the sound. Sonicrama does all three in one instrument, and the picture comes from the sound.
And who it isn't for. If you want a synth that arrives pre-solved, with four thousand presets and a browser to hunt through, you'll be happier elsewhere. The demo never expires, so one session will tell you.
Everything you hear in these clips comes from Sonicrama.
A track played by seven instances of Sonicrama: a pulse, bells, dub accents, a brass theme, chords, a META drum kit and a stutter bass. Each figure on screen is drawn by the part that plays it.
One patch played with one hand: D3 is a bronze bell, E3 a saw-stack chord, C3 a dry sub and G3 a pluck. The plate redraws for each of them.
More clips in the Journal: tuning you can see → · one note, five plates →
Secure checkout by Stripe · VAT included · instant licence by email
Export — MP4, square, up to 4096 × 4096, 30 or 60 fps, audio embedded · PNG stills at the same sizes · reproducible renders
Runs in Logic, Ableton, Bitwig, Reaper and more. On Windows it needs a DirectX 12 graphics card — details in the FAQ below.
Sessions last 15 minutes, exported clips carry a small engraved signature and presets can't be saved. Everything else is the full instrument, and you can keep using it as long as you like.
AU, VST3, CLAP and standalone · macOS 11+ Universal · Windows 10/11 64-bit. No account or email needed to download.
Want to stay updated on what’s new? Leave your email, and I’ll drop you a line from time to time, to share Sonicrama news and everything coming out of the lab.
Now. It came out on September 13, 2026, for macOS and Windows. Your licence arrives by email the moment payment clears — or start with the free demo, which never expires.
€129 once, and it's yours forever — no subscription, ever.
Until October 4, the launch price is €89.
Yes, and you can keep it. Sessions run 15 minutes — restart the app or your DAW to start a new one. Exported clips carry a small engraved signature, and presets can't be saved. Everything else is unlocked: all four oscillators on every key, the full tuning system, FX sends, the physics engine, 4K export. The demo never expires. Get the demo →
Version 2.3.3 adds a solo button to every oscillator. It works on the whole instrument or on a single META key, you can solo several oscillators at once, and it switches without clicks under held notes. Each FX send now has its own level, so an oscillator goes into the reverb or the delay by exactly the amount you choose, key by key if you like. META keys are quicker to shape: select several straight from the keyboard and edit them together while their tunings stay put, copy and paste oscillators or whole keys, and send a selection back to the patch in one go. LFOs and envelopes gained trigger modes, so each key can run its own cycle and release. The plate can listen to up to 32 harmonics per oscillator (Options → Cymatics), and video bounces no longer repeat frames.
Earlier in 2.3: FX sends, a library wavetable on every key (up to 512 in one patch), modulation depths per key and visuals locked to your display. The app tells you when an update is out.
Switch on META and any of the 128 keys can override the instrument: its own waveform or library wavetable, morph, frequency and tuning, gain, pan, phase, stereo delay, unison, FM and AM, effect sends — even the depth of each modulation. Keys you don't touch follow the patch; keys you do become their own instrument, marked with a violet gem — from there you can reset one value, or the whole key, back to the patch. That's how one patch can be a bell down low, a drone in the middle and a dry sub under your thumb.
On a Mac: AU, VST3, CLAP and standalone — macOS 11 and up, universal binary for Apple Silicon and Intel. On Windows: VST3, CLAP and standalone (AU is an Apple format) — Windows 10 (21H2 or later) or Windows 11, 64-bit, with a DirectX 12 graphics card. Logic, Ableton, Bitwig, Reaper and anything that hosts those formats. One licence covers both: your three machines can be any mix of Macs and PCs.
Two things worth knowing. Update your graphics driver before the first launch: the plate is a 400,000-particle simulation on the GPU, it needs a DirectX 12 card, and an old driver is the usual cause of trouble. Integrated graphics work — on a laptop, Options → CYMATICS → 30 FPS keeps it cooler. And on Windows N editions, video export needs Microsoft's free Media Feature Pack.
One perpetual licence for you, on up to 3 of your own machines — Macs, PCs, any mix. Fully offline after activation — a licensed copy never needs a connection to keep working — and resellable. Activation happens once per machine, through your browser.
Yes, it's real physics, and every lens it uses is declared. The engine solves the modal equation of a vibrating plate (Bessel mode shapes) and Faraday-wave dispersion for liquids, driven by your actual audio. On the sand plate, modal frequencies and spatial scale are physically exact, cross-checked against published Chladni-plate measurements, and sand renders true at any size. On the liquid plate, spatial frequency is log-compressed above roughly 40 cycles — real Faraday cells at audio rates are millimetric — and the liquid field is 512 points by nature, so it's scaled up for display instead of simulated at full resolution. Non-circular plates use an averaged effective radius, since their true eigenvalues aren't Bessel. Every lens is also declared in the plugin's tooltips.
No. It's a synth first: in plain equal temperament every key can still be its own instrument. When you want to go further, the tuning system is there — .scl, .tun, a scale per oscillator. Where scales come from →
Try the demo first, for as long as you like; that's what it's for. If you buy it and change your mind, you have 14 days to get your money back, no questions asked.
I make Sonicrama on my own. Every choice on this page, and every answer to your email, comes from me. If you want to talk about the ideas behind the instrument — the research, the music, the old questions about sound — I read everything.
— Paolo · AcusMagic
