The Atmogen visual additive synth by Sonorous Codes brings visual sound design to the PC. Mac users have had MetaSynth for years; now Windowsers will be able to join this strange and wonderful party. Atmogen uses up to 1024 oscillators, which are combined to form its sound output. The neat thing is that the oscillators are each displayed as a multicoloured line — the lines are stacked on top of each other to form a 2-dimensional picture that you can edit directly to create your sound. Like MetaSynth, you can edit the picture in any ordinary graphics program before bringing it back to Atmogen to hear it.

Sonourous Codes say it well on their website: “It is your very own decision whether you use atmogen sounds for the purpose of post production, video games, web applications or anything similar or simply feed your sampler with it to use it in your music. Basically, every imaginable sound can be produced with atmogen. The concept of atmogen is versatile to the extent that really everything is possible. atmogen can prove its quality best when the user demands a fresh and innovative sound.”

Here is a summary of some of the most important features.

Export audio files
Import audio files
Import and export image files
Graphical user interface — atmogen’s user interface provides anything you need to create and to modify images. Consequently, the user interface may remind you of an image processing software although the concept of atmogen does not intend to create cute graphics. The only goal is to achieve applicable sound results. Thus, you will work more efficiently with the native tools of atmogen than with any other software being designed only for a graphical purpose.
Up to 1024 oscillators
Flexible graphical envelope
Layer objects — You can use those little images like paper shreds on a layout pad. Thus, the use of layer objects is extremely intuitive. While creating such a layer object the contents area of the background will be moved into the object. Afterwards you can move, rotate freely, resize, duplicate and erase it again.
Tempo/Grid
Markers
Effects — Various image effects change either the whole image or a single layer object abruptly. Beside those well known pedants such like a luxurious blur filter or a simple edge detection from various image processing software this section offers a variety of specialized actions. Those will animate you to experiment with and are developed only to produce valuable and sensible sound results. A real highlight among the effect filters is definitely the graphical EQ. With its 100 bands you can mesh with the frequency spectrum of a project extremely precisely.