Anima

The sounds we think have no pitch are the ones that contain every pitch. Rain, traffic, keys jingling, a coffee grinder running—broadband texture with no discernible tone. But hidden inside is every note on the keyboard. Anima uses resonant filters to extract pitched, playable instruments from recordings you'd never expect to sing.

Drop in a field recording from your morning walk. Play a chord. Listen. The transients in the source—the drips, the footsteps, the unpredictable bursts of noise—trigger resonances that swell and shimmer in ways you couldn't have designed. Each voice plays at a different speed. They cycle in and out of phase. You end up with sounds so delicious you just want to lean in and keep listening.

I built Anima because I wanted to embed my life into my music. One of my presets is a recording of my kitchen—my fiancée moving around in the background, the clatter of mugs and glasses. Now she's baked into the sound. Every time a resonance rings, I know what that texture means. This is the instrument for people who believe found sound adds magic that samples and synthesizers can't touch.

Features

• Play Any Texture: Drums, field recordings, pure noise—the less pitched the source, the more surprising the result. Transients trigger resonances. Dynamics create evolving timbres. Static sounds stay static. Dynamic sounds become alive.
• Material Modes: String, Membrane, Bar, Plate, or Bell—each with harmonic ratios from real acoustic physics. Spread stretches or compresses the overtones differently per material.
• 8 Harmonic Filters: Surgical resonant filters at natural harmonic ratios extract tone from texture. Per-harmonic gain, pan, mute, and solo. The frequencies you boost become the pitch. Everything else falls away.
• Polymetric Magic: Layer the same recording at different start points. Each voice plays at a different speed based on its MIDI note. The transients phase in and out—almost polymetric, not quite random. Tickles of sound you couldn't have programmed.
• Transient Snap: Detected attacks appear as markers on the waveform. Drag the loop start and it snaps to the nearest hit. Adjustable sensitivity in the sample slot menu.
• The Life Knob: Each harmonic drifts independently—slow tape-like wow, fast flutter. The imperfection is per-overtone, not global. Instruments that breathe and wander. Hold a chord and just listen.
• Dual Sample Slots: Blend two textures with independent filter banks and envelopes. One for attack, one for sustain. Or two field recordings at different harmonic intervals. Crossfade between them in real time.
• MPE Expression: Per-note pitch bend that's scale-aware—bend always lands on the correct semitone. Pressure controls amplitude. The main voice plays your note while the second voice adds a fifth or sixth above. Insanely expressive.
• 72 Scale Modes: Major, minor, Hijaz, Pelog, Darbari, Ethiopian Tezeta, Bebop Dominant. Transpose per slot using scale degrees—musically correct intervals, not just semitone math. Concert pitch tuning supports A=432Hz, 415Hz (Baroque), 444Hz, or custom input from 400-480Hz.
• Live Capture: Record audio directly from your DAW into the sample buffer. Hear something in a mix, capture it, play it as an instrument. Auto-Gain normalizes samples to -12dBFS on load. No bouncing, no file management.