Pixelsynth vs WorldTuning

Make a sound in seconds—and shape it while it plays. Pixelsynth turns taps, drags, melodies, and chords into a colorful instrument you can understand by watching it. Everything you play lives on one screen. Touch a note and start exploring. FROM THE DEVELOPER OF PIXELBOOP Pixelsynth is a new visual instrument from the maker of Pixelboop. Both apps share a love of playful grids, immediate feedback, and musical ideas that begin with one touch. PLAY FIRST. LEARN BY WATCHING. Sixteen pads invite you to find a melody, hold a chord, or strum across the screen. Notes light up as you play, and every sound control moves in front of you. You can see what each gesture is doing while you hear the result. SHAPE THE SOUND LIVE • Switch waveforms to change the character of your sound. • Sweep the filter from bright and open to soft and focused. • Shape attack, decay, sustain, and release for crisp plucks, swelling notes, and long tails. • Add motion with LFO, repeating echoes with delay, and depth with reverb. Each control is a colorful tank. Touch higher or lower inside it to set the value directly. Values in the upper half stay where you leave them; notes in the lower half drain away after you lift. It feels immediate because the picture and the sound follow the same gesture. MADE TO BE SEEN Created by a Deaf musician, Pixelsynth treats visual feedback as part of the instrument. The entire musical surface is drawn on a 40 by 24 pixel grid—just 960 pixels—so every control stays visible and every change has a visual response. PLAY IT YOUR WAY Open Pixelsynth as a standalone instrument on iPhone or iPad, or load the included AUv3 instrument in a compatible iOS music host. Your host can send MIDI notes and save the instrument state with your project. A compatible host is available separately. FREE TO EXPLORE No account. No in-app purchases. No third-party ads. The instrument works offline. The standalone app may occasionally show developer news or an introduction to Pixelboop, which you can close immediately. Pixelsynth does not track you or collect the music you play. Open it. Touch a note. See where it takes you.

An orchestra tunes up, and never stops. WorldTuning is an endless drone built from the moment before a concert begins: the oboe gives the A, strings and winds drift in slightly out of tune and settle onto it, voices join, and the whole hall hums. Every sound is synthesised on the spot — there are no recordings inside the app — so the performance never repeats. The screen is the performance itself. Each sound rises from the bottom edge and fades away near the top, the last 45 seconds on screen at once. Left to right is pitch. Colour tells you what is sounding: blue for long tones, green for voices, yellow for short sounds, red for the oboe's A. Each instrument and voice has its own shade, and every stroke swells and thins with its sound. Touch the picture to send the whole orchestra on a journey. Left to right sets the balance between low and high instruments; bottom to top runs through eight places, quiet at the bottom and busy at the top — Solitude, Stillness, Calm, Vertigo, Tuning, Weighty, Radiant and Rhythm — with the top and bottom joined into a loop. A baton knocks on the podium, a crosshair shows where you are aiming, and when you lift your finger the performance travels there over the Transition time while a circle closes in on the spot. Knock three times to stop or start. The performance can also wander the map on its own, and Randomize moves every setting somewhere new. Everything that shapes the sound is in the Sound sheet, grouped into five tabs: - Ensemble — how much the oboe, long tones, short sounds and voices take part, whether the oboe's A comes at random or at a steady interval, and the balance between low and high. - Pitch — the concert pitch from 415 to 466 Hz, how far the players start out of tune and how quickly they converge, how far up the harmonic series they reach and how much its partials stretch, and the temperament: just, equal, quarter tone, 19 tone, slendro, pelog, gamelan or stretched. - Time — density, build-up and an optional pulse. - Motion — slow drifts of pitch and register, breathing density, and waves in which the whole ensemble agrees to tune together. - Tone — vibrato, the air and grain of breath and voice, how much each instrument keeps its own character, a vowel field that makes the orchestra seem to sing, reverb spaces from a small room to a cathedral, and a limiter. Choose how the performance ends: cut off, fade out, one by one, let ring, a final accent, high to low or low to high. Send the sound to Bluetooth speakers, AirPlay speakers such as HomePod, or a USB audio interface, and control it from Control Center and the Lock Screen. Record exactly what you hear as a 48 kHz / 24-bit WAV file. WorldTuning can also listen. With Listening on it hears the sounds around it and tunes its own reference pitch to the pitch it hears, leaving out the sound it is making itself; put two or three devices in a room and they tune to one another. The sound is analysed on this device — nothing is recorded, and nothing is sent. While Listening is on the performance sounds somewhat different, the volume no longer goes all the way down, and AirPlay speakers cannot be chosen. Listening comes with Pro. Leave it running while you work, read or rest. Background Playback keeps it going when you leave the app, Prevent Auto-Lock keeps the picture awake, and the corner buttons can be hidden while still working where they are. A quick guide is built in. WorldTuning is free with a banner ad. Pro, a one-time in-app purchase, removes the ad and unlocks every setting and recording. The Sound sheet is fully available without Pro.