03 / 25·Sound & Audio
SIGNALFORM
Playable synthesizer. A synth maker whose site is the instrument.
About the work
The site for a eurorack builder is itself a playable subtractive voice: oscillator into filter into amplifier, with an LFO and a real oscilloscope. Every knob is a draggable, keyboard-operable control wired straight into Web Audio.
How it was made
The voice was built first as pure audio, then given a face. The scope needed a trigger to stop the waveform swimming; knobs went through a pass to behave as real ARIA sliders so the instrument plays from a keyboard as well as a mouse.
Like every work in the exhibition, it passed three full iteration passes — a visual critique, a deepening pass, and a QA pass at 390px with reduced motion and zero console errors — and documents itself in its own build guide.
Key features
- Full VCO → VCF → VCA voice built on the Web Audio API
- Oscilloscope with rising-edge triggering, like the bench tool
- 270° knobs implemented as accessible ARIA sliders
- Patch-cable motion drawn with GSAP MotionPath
Technology
- Web Audio API
- AnalyserNode
- GSAP MotionPath
- ARIA
In its own light
