Sound from a Virtual Planet

I’ve always been obsessed with finding tools that were unique and personal, secret weapons, if you will. While a good part of my career involves finding creative, interesting ways to use ubiquitous tools, my job gets harder (or easier, for that matter) as production tools become common appliances. Let’s face it, just about everyone has Pro Tools, and tips and tricks are easy to come by. So when there is something interesting that’s off the radar, I try to do a little evangelizing. Over the years, my all time favorite sound design tool has been something called Metasynth, and with the new, version 5 release, I’m back on the soapbox.

Metasynth is the brainchild of San Francisco programmer Eric Wenger. Wenger originally made a name for himself developing the Bryce image processing plug-ins for Photoshop. Coming from this visual orientation, he wondered if some of the techniques developed for manipulating visual images could be used for sound. The result was the original version of Metasynth, first released in the late 1990s, that was most notably used for sound design on The Matrix. Since then, the program has evolved at the methodical pace one might expect from an iconoclast developer. Version 5 takes advantage of Macs with Intel chips, multi-core processors, 32-bit files, along with a host of incremental improvements. Metasynth is a standalone application and not a plug-in, only available for the Mac.

The Metasynth Image Synth
Metasynth is based on some very simple visual metaphors. The grid is a unipolar frequency domain display; time is displayed left-to-right, and pitch from bottom to top. Pitch can be scalar, with virtually any tuning, or frequency-based, making Metasynth a powerful tool for composition as well as sound design. The brightness and color of each pixel represents amplitude and position in the stereo spectrum, red for left, green for right. Blues are ignored and can be used to construct grids or other visual elements that won’t play back. These elements make for a sonogram representation of sound. While a sonogram is usually thought of as an analysis of an existing sound, Metasynth uses this visual interface to create and process sound as well as display it. Metasynth can import an image and construct a sound representation by treating it as a sonogram and simply reading from it. One might think that by importing an interesting picture, a similarly compelling sound might result. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. Most images we respond to visually have little immediate use in Metasynth, although Aphex Twin did use a kind of self portrait to synthesize sound he’s used in his work.

Over the years, Metasynth has evolved into a complete system for processing sound and composing electronic music, but it’s not for the faint of heart. While the basic idea is easy to understand, the overall package is so different from any other piece of music software, you really have to commit some time to learning the program. Thankfully, the documentation is complete and the tutorials are clear, illustrating practical ways to use all aspects of the program. In addition, there’s a healthy user community with plenty of examples of music made using Metasynth. All this is available with the free demo version, available online.