Anima

Turn your life into a playable instrument.

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. 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, so they cycle in and out of phase: almost polymetric, not quite random.

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

Features

• Eight resonant harmonic filters extract tone from texture, with per-harmonic gain, pan, mute and solo — the frequencies you boost become the pitch, everything else falls away
• Eight materials: String, Membrane, Bar, Plate and Bell use harmonic ratios from real acoustic physics; three Noise materials work the other way round, shaping noise vocoder-style so clicks and taps come out as hats, shakers and breaths
• Dual sample slots: blend two recordings with independent filter banks and envelopes — one for attack, one for sustain — and crossfade between them in real time
• Live capture: record audio directly from your DAW into the sample buffer; no bouncing, no file management
• The Life knob: each harmonic drifts independently, from slow tape-like wow to fast flutter, so held chords breathe and wander
• Transient snap: detected attacks appear as markers on the waveform, and the loop start snaps to the nearest hit
• MPE expression: scale-aware per-note pitch bend that always lands on the correct semitone, with pressure controlling amplitude
• 72 scale modes, from Major and minor to Hijaz, Pelog, Darbari and Ethiopian Tezeta, with per-slot transposition by scale degree
• Concert pitch from A=400 to 480 Hz, with 432, 415 (Baroque) and 444 presets
• Configurable polyphony: 1, 4, 8, 12 or 16 voices
• Sample import: WAV, AIFF, MP3, FLAC and OGG; presets embed their audio, so sharing a preset shares the sound, not just the settings
• UI scaling from 100% to 200%