Vascular - Tactile Synth

Vascular is a touch instrument for touch devices. You make sound by growing a network of nodes on a canvas: every node is a synthesis voice or a sound processor, and every vessel you draw between them is a signal path. The picture on the screen is the routing, the instrument and the performance surface at the same time. There is nothing to type and no menu to work through before something sounds. Tap the empty canvas and a generator is seeded, its family and all of its parameters drawn for you. Hold that node and touch elsewhere to grow a processor already connected to it. Hold one node and touch another to join them, or to cut the vessel between them. The canvas is one continuous stereo field, so dragging a node moves it through the image: at the left edge it is heard on the left, at the right edge on the right. Playing and shaping - Rest a finger on the canvas to open the palette: thirteen categories of generators and eight of processors. You choose the region — bowed, granular, spectral, nonlinear — and the instrument draws which voice and how it is tuned. - A short press scatters a node's parameters around its family's defaults. A double tap gives it a rhythmic gate. - The edit key opens a node's own controls: level and up to six parameters of its opcode on sliders, plus a modulator that can be redrawn at any time. - Draw one generator into another and it does not feed it but modulates it, at audio rate — ring, amplitude, phase or filter. - New patch grows a small ensemble under musical rules rather than at random: one chord in the session's key, a foundation and a body, sometimes a motion voice and a glint. - Acoustic nodes play a sampled instrument — glockenspiel, marimba, celesta, flute, dulcimer, harp, piano, harpsichord, cello or string section — through a melodic loop written for that instrument's own articulation, and they can be gated and processed like anything else. - Hold the drift key and the whole organism wanders, each node at its own speed. Keeping the work - Sessions carry the canvas, the settings and 32 pattern slots together, and the app opens where you left it. - A short press recalls a pattern, a long press stores into one. - Undo steps back through the last 48 edits. - The record key captures a take of the master output as a 16-bit 48 kHz stereo WAV. Hold it to browse your takes: play them back, rename them, and send them out through the Android share sheet. - A built-in guide describes every gesture, every key and every slider. What it needs - A multi-touch screen and landscape orientation. It is built for tablets primarily; but renders on smartphones too - Android 10 or newer. Up to 36 nodes sound at once, and the limit is there so the graph stops growing rather than starting to stutter. - Headphones or decent speakers, since much of the vocabulary lives at the edges of the register. Privacy Vascular runs entirely on the device. It has no account, no ads and no internet permission, and it collects nothing. Recordings and sessions stay in the app's own storage until you share them yourself. Audio is synthesised and endered by Csound (LGPL). The sampled instruments in the acoustic section are cut from MuseScore_General (MIT).