Hoverophone vs Harmonious

Play a theremin in the air with your hands—no screen taps, controller, or antenna required. Hoverophone uses the front camera to follow your hands. Raise or lower a hand to glide the pitch, change the distance between your thumb and any finger to control volume, and move from side to side to pan the sound. Raise a hand and you are already playing that unmistakable, otherworldly theremin voice. A POLYPHONIC SYNTH Choose a sine, triangle, saw, or square wave, then add drive and ring modulation. Movement across the camera controls the stereo field. Hoverophone tracks up to four hands at once, so you can play chords instead of a single melody. Bring two sounding hands together to pin a note in place. Pinned notes continue to ring while you play, giving you as many as twelve simultaneous voices: four live and eight sustained. MICROTONAL NOTES IN THE AIR Leave the note grid off for the classic continuous theremin glide. Turn it on to snap the pitch to 12-TET notes or 24-TET quarter tones on an isomorphic hexagonal grid. Move your hand into a cell and the note lands in tune without touching the screen. The 24-TET mode opens the door to microtonal and xenharmonic music while preserving the instrument's in-air control. FEATURES - Front-camera hand tracking with no screen contact - Continuous theremin pitch or an isomorphic note grid - 12-TET and 24-TET tuning with quarter tones - Up to four tracked hands and twelve simultaneous voices - Four waveforms, drive, ring modulation, and stereo panning - Sound through the speaker or headphones, even in silent mode - No account required; plays without a network connection HOW TO PLAY THE THEREMIN A theremin is an electronic musical instrument played without physical contact. In Hoverophone, simply raise a hand in front of the camera. Move up and down to change pitch, open and close the space between your fingers to shape volume, and move left or right to place the sound in the stereo field. If you are learning how to play the theremin, start in continuous mode and practice smooth pitch glides. Switch to 12-TET when you want help landing on familiar notes, or choose 24-TET to play quarter tones and explore microtonal music. Hoverophone is a touch-free theremin app and polyphonic synthesizer app for iPhone and iPad, built for musicians who want expressive camera control without extra hardware. Camera frames are processed entirely on your device and never leave it. Hoverophone does not use the microphone. Create a soft ambient pad, build a dense drone, or summon the eerie sweep of a science-fiction soundtrack. For the most reliable tracking, play in a well-lit room where the camera can see your hands clearly.

Harmonious is a microtonal ambient instrument. Touch the screen and a tone blooms; leave it alone and the music keeps evolving on its own — slow, endless, never repeating. Harmonious gives you 38 scales, including just intonation, Erv Wilson's combination product sets, Bohlen-Pierce, Slendro and Pelog, historical temperaments and rare microtonal systems you cannot play on a piano. If you have ever wanted to hear what lives between the keys, this is it. You need no musical training. Anything you touch sounds good, because the scale does the work. TWO WAYS TO PLAY • Create: tap anywhere and warm, slow-attack notes bloom under your finger. Pitch follows the vertical axis; panning and brightness follow the horizontal. • Listen: a generative composer plays gentle, ever-changing music over a deep drone. Tune its intensity, density, harmonic complexity, presence and randomness. 38 TUNINGS OF THE WORLD Just intonation and pure rational intervals. Erv Wilson's Hexany, Dekany, Eikosany and other combination product sets. Bohlen-Pierce. Indonesian Slendro and Pelog. Greek modes. Meditative handpan layouts. Historical temperaments. Golden-ratio scales. From the most consonant to the most alien — all of them tuned to stay beautiful, never tense. RECORD AND SHARE Record what you play, name it, keep it. Send a piece to a friend with a link — it opens straight in their app. Or publish it to the public gallery for others to hear. CLASSICAL PIECES A growing library of composed pieces to listen to, each written for a particular tuning. SOUND Rich additive synthesis with long reverb tails and a clean mastering chain. 360° spatial audio places the sound gently around your head — use headphones. SLEEP AND WAKE A sleep timer that fades out on its own, and a wake alarm that brings you round with a generative scene instead of a ringtone. PRIVATE BY DESIGN No accounts. No ads. No analytics. No data collection. Everything runs on your device. FREE AND PREMIUM Free includes four scales and stereo playback. One single payment unlocks every tuning, 360° spatial audio, recording, the sleep timer and the wake alarm. No subscription, ever. Put on your headphones and listen to the notes between the notes.