It's really difficult to describe such a genre-breaking application as UI Software's MetaSynth and not sound like a gushing fan. Version 2.5 of last year's most amazing sound and music development system is one of the marvels of digital audio software in its clever merging of advanced audio synthesis technology with an unique user interface that anyone can appreciate within twenty minutes of loading the application.
MetaSynth uses an image based editing scheme that considers a visual dot as an audio event. The source of the sound can be a looped or nonlooped sample, internally generated wave tables, keyboard style multisample called Instruments and virtual synthesizer modules. An image controls the compositional shape from which sound is rendered and transformed into music by a simple but brilliant transference metaphor: vertical position means pitch, horizontal length represents time duration, color represents stereo position (red: left, yellow: center, green: right) and brightness represents volume. Using graphics tools to alter the image now has a musical effect that very soon becomes intuitive once the initial wonder stuff wears off. MetaSynth 2.5 adds more graphics tools but outside apps are recommended for the more complex visual transformations.
Sounds are loaded in Sound Designer II or AIFF formats and can be exported to those formats. Samples can be spliced, looped, cross faded and otherwise edited within the application. The Wavetable Palette allows interactive waveform sculpting and morphing with immediately audible results. A Procedural Synth module uses FM synthesis for sound generation. You can also use Instruments which are multi samples akin to what most digital synthesizers utilize, now in stereo. Images are in Mac PICT format.
Sound can also be drastically or subtly manipulated easily once it 's been graphically realized. Graphical filters will change volume and or spatial characteristics based on the color they use. Signal processing effects happen in both sound and vision and witnessing this process is best described as unbelievably cool. An entire Effects Pallet with settings for Echo, Reverb, Granular Synthesis, Harmonization and many others is included. Here complicated DSP setting becomes gestural waving motions over a target-like control. The Granual Synthesis creates those rich snippets of sound that academic sound sculptors easily. You can spend countless hours just creating sounds and then twisting them into unforeseen consequences.
MetaSynth 2.5 has expanded the sonic tool set to even more creative audio tools! Besides expanding the set of filters available they have improved the DSP as well as the overall performance of the product. A Wave Shaping tool allows manual editing of a source waveform to alter it's harmonic contents, like a user controlled reverse oscilloscope that creates sound from a dynamic image. There is Spectrum Synthesis which analyzes a sound an then allows those characteristics to be overlaid on another sound. There is a new set of time based effects for stretching and compressing audio and images.
UI Software graciously includes quite a few samples and premade Instruments on the CD-ROM to get you started or you can record and create your own. MetaSynth 2.5 supplies a different set of raw materials than MetaSynth 2.0 did and includes a demo version of MetaTrack, a sound assembler and track generation kit with that same cool look. Some of the premade presets are quite entertaining in their own right and cover all sorts of musical directions.
While the hard copy manual has been improved quite a bit, a third party Wizoo cookbook has been produced and makes a great adjunct to the standard docs. What would be great to produce in the near future is a more even more basic tutorial for non-synth-non-MIDI geeks like graphic artists or traditional musicians wanting to get started.
Despite its very cutting edge look, MetaSynth makes no assumptions about the kind of music it is expected to create: uisoftware's Music Gallery has everything from neoclassical to abstract techno-electronica-genre-of-the-month examples. To capture the profound impact this application has had on music synthesis and sound design the best analogy out there is the effect that Adobe PhotoShop has had on the graphic arts. MetaSynth has created a cross-medium environment where the visual becomes the audible and the controlling mechanism is not a bunch of knobs and parameter panels but a series of brushes and masking entities. What author Eric Wenger (who also created Bryce 3D) did was harness the advanced research work done in sound synthesis by the Paris IRCAM audio think tank under a Kaišs-Power-Tools-like graphical interface to create a truly visionary product.
Since the earlier versions, this Mac-only product defined the cutting edge of experimental audio/music and one can epect it to do so in the future.
