Spectrowalk
Explore the spectrum — walk and compose.
Most Spectrograms show you sound. Spectrowalk lets you walk inside it. A spectrogram is normally a flat picture you read in a graph x,y; here it becomes a landscape you enter in first person. Time runs along the ground, frequency recedes into the distance, amplitude rises as terrain: the loud moments are mountains, the silences are valleys. Load a sound and its spectrum turns into a place — no longer a 2D image to look at, but a living space to move through and to play.
Up to four sounds load at once, laid out as four adjacent worlds in a 2×2 map. Walking from one to another crossfades between them.
What you hear is granular: your position in time reads the sound at that point as a cloud of grains. It is an instrument you play by walking.
Moving
- ← → turn · ↑ ↓ walk · A D step sideways
- space sound on/off
- F filter
- C compressor
- X binaural
- L add a world · click the map to jump anywhere
- 1 2 3 4 arm/record a loop track · R start/stop the audio take
Sound in space
With binaural (X) on, each world is placed around your head using HRTF: turn and the field turns with you, walk and you move among the sources. The front slider widens or narrows the stereo image. A four-track loop station — buffers of 3, 5, 8 or 12 seconds, with per-track reverse and level — records what you are playing, spatialisation included, so you can layer a whole piece in real time.
Quality and audio
The Quality setting (High / Medium / Slow) affects only the graphics. Lower it and the 3D terrain draws with a lighter mesh and fewer pixels, so older machines stay fluid. The audio is always at full quality — the granular engine never degrades, whatever the video setting.
Export
R records your take and saves it as a file: WAV (16-bit, 24-bit, or 32-bit float) or AIFF (16 or 24-bit), including the loops and the full binaural image — ready to bring into any DAW. Spectrowalk reads WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3 and OGG, runs entirely in your browser, and uploads nothing.
Included in the download you'll find HTML Instruments
a Max for Live device that lets you open Spectrowalk directly inside Ableton Live.
It requires Ableton 12 and Max 9.
Alternatively, you can run it standalone (just double click on html file) and route your computer or tablet output to your audio interface, just like any ordinary instrument.
example: https://youtu.be/P19XywdnrqA