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Sassy Audio Spreadsheet

Categories: Software Prototypes/Non-Commercial Products

Submitted by:Jari Komppa

24 May 2023

Elevator Pitch

Sassy Audio Spreadsheet

Virtual modular synthesizer with the user interface of a spreadsheet

Product Description

Sassy Audio Spreadsheet

Sassy is an audio spreadsheet. Or, as it stands, it's THE audio spreadsheet. It's a spreadsheet. You can add values to cells, ask it to average a range. It's a synthesizer. You can ask it to generate a sine wave based on time, and output it through your speakers. Add an ADSR envelope, modulate the frequency based on MIDI input note, put in some filters and hey, it's an actual instrument. Sassy includes over 100 functions, including some that largely make sense in a spreadsheet way (like finding maximum value out of a range) and others that largely make sense in a synthesizer way (like high pass filter, various waveform generators, delays etc) as well as a whole lot that make sense in both (like trigonometry). Want to control something with a slider? Just add slider() to your formula, and a slider pops up. Same goes for buttons, toggles, graphs, fft:s. Want to control something with your midi keyboard? Just add calls to midipot, midinote, midinoteon, midival. Want to control your midi synth with Sassy? Just add midiout, midioutpot, midioutpitch.. Sassy is available for windows at https://sol-hsa.itch.io/sassy, with source code on github at github.com/jarikomppa/sassy/

How It's Innovative

As far as I know, nobody has ever made a spreadsheet that's also a virtual modular synthesizer.

See MIDI Innovation In Action

Most Inspiring Use Cases

The beta testers made Sassy make sounds I did not expect to get it to generate. Musicians with modular experience said it was an interesting approach to audio generation, which forced them to think about audio from a different direction.

Expansion Plans

Open sourcing Sassy allows some expansions that were difficult while closed source, including "export as C code". Being open source it is possible for other people to also contribute to it, should they wish to do so.

Commercialization

Sassy was initially pay-what-you-want, but after initial push interest seems to have waned, so it is now available for free, along with source code.