IMAGE S

A patchable synthesiser whose objects are photographs. The average colour of an image decides what kind of object it becomes; position decides what it feeds; the scan line reads one column of pixels as a continuous control.

Tempo 96 bpm

Link range 240 px

Surface — signal flows right

OUT

Paste an image, or drop a file

Remote images cannot be loaded here, so the swatches are generated in the page. Pasted and dropped files work normally.

Obj	Type	Hue	Sat	Lum	Reads	Level	Feeds

Lightness sets pitch · saturation sets intensity · colour variety sets complexity · horizontal position sets level.

Built on the design principles in Sergi Jordà's Digital Lutherie (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2005), the thesis behind the reacTable. All sound is synthesised with the Web Audio API — no samples, no libraries.

No presets: There is no object palette. A photograph is the only way to make a new object, so an object's character comes from material rather than from a menu. Jordà: presets are the first enemy of an instrument's identity.
Building is playing: There is no edit mode. Moving an object rewires the patch and changes the sound in the same gesture.
Signal flows right: Each object feeds the nearest processor to its right within the link range, or the output rail. Because the ordering is strictly one-directional, feedback loops cannot form. Level rises as an object approaches the rail.
Wide, not deep: Every object exposes its parameters directly on the surface rather than through a mapping layer: horizontal position sets level, proximity sets routing, and the scan line sets one continuous parameter. Nothing is hidden behind a menu.
The instrument may play badly: Pitch is not quantised to a scale. A good instrument does not impose its music on the player, which means it has to be capable of sounding wrong.