You’d think that I’d be all over this. I thought I’d be all over this, but every time I tried out the demo it failed to light my life. The idea that you can grow what looks a bit like a green lightning ball to represent the sound of your dreams seems more wish than reality. You grow a branch along a single note, or more usefully across all the notes, and as it grows the sound gets … “more”. More loud / less filtered / more metallic / less smooth …
Very helpful if you don’t have a specific goal in mind and infuriating if you do. The structure of a synthetic note is the heart of electronic composition – the reason you are not just using a piano and worrying more about the score. Sound composition by dice is … well … dicey.
You can jump to another page where some individual controls are available – you’re shown an image of DNA so that you can feel like major science is going on – but it’s just a bunch of knobs adjusting some aspects of the sound. That is – having randomly made a sound you then carve it to get nearer to something useful. You could then give it a name and hope that it becomes just the ticket some time in the future.
More interesting is the Genopatch, which examines a section of a sound sample and by (what seems to be) a period of trial and error comes close to reproducing it. But if you want fidelity to a known sound then you would use Serum 2 or Padshop. A Genopatch will never quite be true to the source, but there’s a chance you’ll get a uncanny noise that might be inspiring.
This is allegedly a matter of “AI”. It’s hard to know whether it really is AI, given that AI now describes everything and nothing. I have made a few slightly warbled sounds this way and it’s a bit of fun.
The reason I bought Synplant (reminder folks – I don’t get review copies, I spend my own income on this) is the newest feature where you type in a description and get a sound response. You could try A BOWED PIANO and get something a bit like that. FEMALE AAH VOICE is not too bad either, although not realistic. But then I type something like STAMPED ON A CHICKEN and you see the engine gagging in real time and coming up with a casiotone.
The moment you put words into something like this it jumps into a cauldron of linguistics, statistics and ballistics.
Don’t buy it because you expected they sent a poet.
Is it worth buying? I feel like I will find some good sounds here that I wouldn’t otherwise create. I like the Genopatch. But I think when the tough get going this isn’t going into battle with me. It may yet inspire some clever work based around its novelty, in which case I’ll be back with more toilet paper.