I've been working on the Anukari 3D Physics Synthesizer for a little over two years now. It's one of the earliest virtual instruments to rely on the GPU for audio processing, which has been incredibly challenging and fun. In the end, predictably, the GUI for manipulating the 3D system actually ended up being a lot more work than the physics simulation.<p>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.<p>The official launch announcement video is here: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYX_eeNVIEU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYX_eeNVIEU</a><p>But if you REALLY want to see what it can do, check out what Mick Cormick did with in on the first day: <a href="https://x.com/Mick_Gordon/status/1918146487948919222" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/Mick_Gordon/status/1918146487948919222</a><p>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:
<a href="https://anukari.com/blog/devlog" rel="nofollow">https://anukari.com/blog/devlog</a><p>I also gave a talk at Audio Developer Conference 2023 (ADC23) that goes deep into a couple of the problems I solved for Anukari: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb8b1SYy73Q" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb8b1SYy73Q</a>
Glad I’m not the only audio developer around here.<p>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.<p>My 2 cents
This looks incredible! But to be honest, it also looks incredibly daunting.<p>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.<p>Again, this looks awesome, and I really hope you can make this into a business, so please see my critique above as encouragement.
This reminds me of the reverse, where music drives 3D animations. I remember Animusic from the early decade of 2000.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animusic" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animusic</a> , <a href="https://www.animusic.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.animusic.com/</a> , <a href="https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=animusic" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=animusic</a> , <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@julianlachniet9036/videos" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/@julianlachniet9036/videos</a>
For anyone seeing this post a bit late: I need a bit of help from someone inside Apple who works on Metal. If you know someone, it would be great if you could connect me to them:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43901619">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43901619</a><p><a href="https://anukari.com/blog/devlog/an-appeal-to-apple" rel="nofollow">https://anukari.com/blog/devlog/an-appeal-to-apple</a>
Not sure I'll ever use this as it seems like a lot of work but wanted to say thank you for allowing me to download a demo without giving an email.<p>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.<p>Definitely the most interesting synth I've ever seen.
Really cool stuff! I would suggest putting a 60-second video at the very top of the page that stitches together short clips of the many ways it is awesome.
Really cool to see GPUs applied to sound synthesis. Didn’t realize that all one needed to do to keep up with the audio thread was to batch computations at the size of the audio thread. I’m fascinated by the idea of doing the same kind of thing for continua in the manner of Stefan Bilbao: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Numerical-Sound-Synthesis-Difference-Simulation/dp/0470510463" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Numerical-Sound-Synthesis-Difference-...</a><p>Although I wonder if mathematically it’s the same thing …
Thank you for this, it looks very cool!<p>Remind me of Korg's Berlin branch with their Phase8 instrument: <a href="https://korg.berlin/" rel="nofollow">https://korg.berlin/</a> . Life imitates art imitates life :)<p>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 would love to watch (and listen) to a discussion between you and Noah from Audiocube, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42877399">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42877399</a> <a href="https://main.audiocube.app/" rel="nofollow">https://main.audiocube.app/</a> a 3d spatial DAW.
At a glance, this looks like a bunch of coupled oscillators. A natural extension of this idea is strings: a 1d array of oscillators modelling a wave equation. For example, a piano sound can be modelled by attaching a basic oscillator to one end of a string and a mic to the other end of the string. The string and the oscillator push each other, creating the piano tone. Real pianos use 3 such string with different properties.<p>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.
This is so cool and has unlimited potential, like you could model real instruments, e.g. guitar to experiment with resonant chamber shapes, materials etc. Can't upvote enough on good old perpetual licensing model!
I’m very curious about your experience doing audio on the GPU. What kind of worst-case latency are you able to get? Does it tend to be pretty deterministic or do you need to keep a lot of headroom for occasional latency spikes? Is the latency substantially different between integrated vs discrete GPUs?
Love physics based audio! Using the GPU is a great idea.<p>Another physical audio simulation I like is the engine sound simulator made by AngeTheGreat: <a href="https://youtu.be/RKT-sKtR970?si=t193nZwh-jaSctQM" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/RKT-sKtR970?si=t193nZwh-jaSctQM</a>
Note they are referring to Mick Gordon who is notable for the recent DOOM soundtrack. DOOM Eternal has a truly phenomenal score. Mick Cormick is a mistake I believe.<p>Congratulations!!
Whoa this looks really cool! I love how you made something physically 3D to stand out in a world full of 2D knobs and sliders… but it still has 2D sliders because those work the best for dialing things in with precision.
I think to be useful it needs a mode of playing, that is always musical / in tune.<p>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...<p>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)<p>Anyway, amazing work and having it on GPU allows this really to scale.
Absolutely awesome! I know nothing about music production but I want to play with it just for fun. Maybe a very simplified, web-based version for people who just to play a bit? Would be awesome.<p>Congrats on the hard work and the launch, in any case!<p>Edit: I see you have a demo mode, that's great! Exactly what I was looking for
I'm not really familiar with audio stuff, but holy do I ever appreciate the write-ups you've done. This is <i>absolutely fascinating</i> stuff. I'm eager to keep reading. The video from Mick Gordon was awesome, too.<p>Congratulations on the launch, and best of luck!
I’m so tempted to buy, but some info is missing on the website:<p>- If I buy once can I run it on both my Windows desktop and MacBook travel computer?<p>- If so, are files compatible between them?<p>- What are GPU requirements on Windows? I’m sure it scales, but is a 3080 overkill or not enough?
I have mixed feelings about all of my supposed clever ideas being executed on by other people way ahead of me, but this is cool and you have my respect.
I like the perpetual license, no AI, and customisable 3D models and animations. This last feature hopefully opens up potential for making creatively synchronised graphics such as animating the expression - say the mouth shape on a 3D face in response to modulation. I wonder if the animation needs to be a fixed amount of frames or length?
I am your target market, and I can't wait to try out the demo once I'm back from Superbooth and allowed to be distracted even a little.<p>... 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.<p>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?
Consider putting the purchase CTA inside the app, and just having a giant DOWNLOAD NOW button above the fold. The download for the demo and the real one should be the same download.<p>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.
Looks very fun :-) Does anyone notice issues with the sound quality? In many of the examples I hear clicking: sometimes as if the attack is too high, or as if there is some kind of aliasing or sample rate issue, or just clipping. Probably noticeable with headphones. For instance in the announcement video at 3:11 or in the "J.S. Bach, Prelude in C Major (BWV 846)" video between 4.4s and 7.2s. It's somewhat visible if I load that audio in Audacity and turn on the spectrogram view with these settings: Logarithmic, 200 to 6000 Hz. Algorithm: Reassignment, 1024, Blackman-Harris, 1. Colors: 50, 40, 50.<p>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?<p>Correction: some videos also do have glitchs on Chromium.
Sounds like a lot of work has gone into to the infrastructure of getting this to work on the GPU.<p>Did you find it more interesting doing this or the physics simulation ?<p>Have you considered simulating strings or moving air too ?
I second the recommendation: even if you don't have a Twitter/X account, find some way to watch Mick Gordon's session!<p>I find it hysterically funny, but at the same time, it really shows what this synth is capable of.<p>Excellent!
Hey evan
Just wondering, can you import 3d models into this envireonment? Im still pining for a less "code" driven environment for this than max/msp modalsys.
Your beta video assumes I know why I should care and jumps straight into technicals.<p>This is potentially new to producers. Tell them why they should care first.
The sounds seem to mostly be modulated sines with limited timbral variety? I'm not sure how <a href="https://youtu.be/NYX_eeNVIEU?t=179" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/NYX_eeNVIEU?t=179</a> got harmonic series out of the building blocks.
Man. “Sheet music is not portable”. I immediately thought about the Apple Vision Pro<p>The battery-less medium is something we do desperately try to mimic