Developer Alexander Zolotov shared this preview of Virtual ANS v3 – the latest version of his software recreation of the unique Russian synthesizer ‘ANS’ – a photoelectronic musical instrument created by Evgeny Murzin from 1938 to 1958.
The ANS made it possible to draw music in the form of a spectrogram (sonogram) and then translate the score directly into sound. It was used by Stanislav Kreichi, Alfred Schnittke, Edward Artemiev and other Soviet composers in their experimental works. You can also hear the sound of the ANS in Andrei Tarkovsky’s movies Solaris, The Mirror & Stalker.
Features:
- unlimited number of pure tone generators;
- powerful sonogram editor – you can draw the spectrum and play it at the same time;
- any sound (from a WAV file or a Microphone/Line-in) can be converted to image (sonogram) and vice versa;
- support for MIDI devices;
- polyphonic synth mode with MIDI mapping;
- supported file formats: WAV (only uncompressed PCM), PNG, JPEG, GIF;
- Audio Unit Extension (AUv3), Audiobus;
Pricing and Availability
Virtual ANS is available for iOS, Android, Linux, MacOS & Windows. It’s a free download, but donations are encouraged to support future development.
Love ANS – soooo stttrange… 🙂
Been playing with it for the last hour, so much fun. Some of the noises I was getting out of it and the overall look kind of reminded me a little bit of U&I Metasynth
It’s really cool. It seems like a huge bank of sine waves that you activate with pixels and a wiper. The pitch resolution of the sines isn’t infinite. You can hear that it quantizes or just has some number of sines per half-step. I can’t tell what it is. Still, it allows you to make some very fascinating sounds.
I wish there were more extensive drawing tools, but you can do quite a lot with what’s offered.
in german iOS app store, it’s not free. it is €6.99.
It’s $5.99 here in the US
I’ve been playing with this software too and it’s unbelievable. 720 voice polyphony in the 40s….wow. If the guy who invented this would have lived in the US, thirty years later a monophonic synth would have looked more like a school project than a revolutionary synth
anyone know if the update is free with the older version?
No, not a free upgrade.
This looks like a step on from Coagula, an earlier image programme with a similar sound and frequency domain editing. A frustration with this form of synthesis is it smears the transients owing to windowing, and you need sensible logarithmic scaling on the y axis to paint in the harmonics. It’s a paradigm shift – a low pass filter is darker at the top, a bandpass is a darkstipe across and so on. This is a very impressive demo, some of the sounds are really earcatching and I love the real time interactivity. Good work!
This looks like a step on from Coagula, an earlier image programme with a similar sound and frequency domain editing. The frustrations with this from of synthesis is it smears the transients, and you need sensible logarithmic scaling on the y axis to paint in the harmonics. This is a very impressive demo, some of the sounds are really earcatching and I love the real time interactivity. Good work!
It doesn’t really sound that good now, does it? I’d be somewhat impressed in 1980, i e 39 years ago.
It’s an unusual sound, limited in application but it earns its place. I think this guy is brilliant, between his unique apps and experimental hardware he reminds me of developers like nanoloop, mutable instruments, etc. etc.
It’s free no more..