Car maker KIA , in collaboration with Brazilian synth designer Arthur Joly, has released a free software synthesizer, move.ment, that’s inspired by pink noise and the sounds of movement in nature.
Pink noise or 1/f noise is a ‘color’ of noise where the intensity falls as frequency rises. Compared to white noise, pink noise could be described as “deeper” or “less hissy”.
Many natural systems, like surf and wind, create variations of pink noise. Pink noise has also been shown in some experiments to be soothing, to improve focus and to help people fall asleep, because of the way it masks sounds and mimics natural noise sounds.
Here’s what they KIA has to say about the free synthesizer:
“The sounds of movement in nature produce what’s known as pink noise. This increases the alpha waves in the brain, inducing the flow state of consciousness, the state in which the brain is at its most creative. These natural sounds were recorded all over the world and used to develop the one-of-a-kind instrument, that we call move.ment.”
move.ment features:
- Sample-based natural sounds
- VCO with four classic waveforms
- Noise
- Reverb
- Filter
- Dual ADSR envelopes
- Output tone control
- Touchpad keyboard controller
They’ve also released a collection of tracks made with move.ment:
Pricing and Availability
move.ment is available now as a free download for Mac & Windows.
If you give move.ment a try, share your thoughts on it in the comments!
what an incredibly brilliant demo video!
Nice ad, KIA. Synths are like the least subversive thing in music right now it seems.
Good on Kia for giving away an interesting synth. But their video has a annoying amount of hyperbole. Just a few days ago Hainbach pitched his and AudioThing’s new synth also based on various types of noise and at no point was I shown video of some poor listener being shoved into a MRI machine so they could scientifically measure their response. I preferred Hainbach’s low key and personable presentation to Kia’s “In Search Of” scientific nonsense.
If it was April Fool’s Day, I would have thought it was a joke.
No no no. Please industry, product and advertisement people. Dont use music and instruments to help selling more of your destroing products.
The demo tracks are kind of interesting, but there’s a similarity among them- especially the first three.
The “ad” was definitely setting off my internal B.S. alarms.
Kind of cool that this electric car will make some weird synthy space-ship noises.
Whatever noise it makes it will still cause even more damage to the environment than a petrol car. It pains me to see that this industry is pushed forward with nasty ad propaganda such as this.
The concept is cool. But it’s just one of 8 short nature samples looping continuously while you play with a 1-oscillator monosynth that has filter and amplitude ADSRs but no modulation. The resonant filter is mildly interesting.
Quite disappointing really. I had hoped for the sound sources to be used as the basis for some sort of formant synthesis or at least as wavetables but this is lazy and I think they spent more time shooting the video and making the presets than they did making the synthesizer.
From a minimalistic design standpoint this is genius.
No retro 1960 tons of features, options and graphics junkfood clutter.
Very specific and well polished details that sound good!
Pure streamlined simplistic minimalism.
You really think it sounds good ? It’s aweful, the presets are lifeless and are pretty much all the same, and I tried a dozen.
It’s just a marketing operation with a video that took more time to make than the product itself. Better for them to stick to cars IMO.
I think some commenters missed the point of this. Kia created this VST with the purpose of making the sounds for audio feedback in their cars. It’s totally different to what Hainbach did.
Since millions of people are going to drive the cars and the audio feedback needs to have exactly the right effect, I’m pretty glad if they based it on some actual psychoacoustic experiments, which surely someone somewhere has indeed done with MRIs (maybe in academic research or maybe at Kia).
I know Jaguar employed Richard Devine for some sounds, and Microsoft employed Brian Eno, and so on. It’s great that Kia also share their process. It’s akin to Devine sharing some of his patches that he made for Jaguar. I think it’s meant to be judged in this way, not as a competitor to Hainbach’s thing.
I hope the synth makes a nicer noise than my Kia Niro does when reversing. Horrible, anti-social and ineffective ‘bonging’ noises that come from the FRONT of the car and can be heard 100 feet away.
Actually, judging by the number of different annoying sounds the Niro has, perhaps Kia should give up on cars and go entirely into synth production.
It can make you wonder through the forest dressed like you are in a night club.
I feel sorry for the person they put in an MRI scanner and made them listen to these tracks.
They’re not bad tracks per se. Just imagine being in that tube and thinking, “I better relax or I’m never gonna get paid.”
The first three tracks sound kind of similar to me.
OMG, this terrible video. Brainwash BS, BS, BS. And some more BS. No thanks, even if the software is good.
Tried it out. It is underwhelming. Uninstalled it already. Looks like it installs Csound to get itself to work.
I did the same. Nothing but a marketing gimmick to try to entice creatives to consider Kia. If you want a good, free usuable synth plugin, get Surge XT.
I’ve been looking at a Telluride or a Sorento, if they had any cars to sell, I’d have picked one up in December.
After seeing this and trying to understand their focus and direction as a car manufacturer, Ford is looking real good right now.
I think somewhere in the C-suite at KIA headquarters, there’s a middle-aged executive having one hell of a midlife crisis.
I enjoyed their Kia Ora orange juice in the cinema in the olden days, good to see they’ve diversified though – I think you have to these days
So it’s vanilla. It’s also free, and no worse than synths I paid a substantial price for in the 70s (I’m thinking SH-101).
It ain’t a Moog One. And the installer could use a little work. But it has some nice sounds, and it’s free. I wish they’d make an iOS version. It’s easy to target Kia, I guess, but – it’s a nice little free synth with some good sounds. Thank you!
“This increases the alpha waves in the brain,”
insert Esoterik blah blah blah here – like closing your eyes does 😉
I couldn’t open the installer package on my Mac … a window pops up saying that the App needs to be updated by the developer.
Yeah that’s pretty much the experience Kia drivers (like me) get when they try and update the car software…