Anukari 3D Physics Synthesizer

Anukari is a 3D physics playground where you can create whatever 3D physics machine you can dream of.

Anukari’s 3D physics simulation operates using similar principles to a physics engine for a video game, except that instead of running at video frame rate (e.g. 60 Hz), it runs the simulation at audio sample rate (e.g. 48,000 Hz). Hundreds of point masses in the 3D world can be connected to one another with springs, and a variety of other components can be connected to the masses to introduce vibration (mallets, bows, plectrums, etc) or to modulate their parameters (LFOs, envelopes, etc). Virtual 3D microphones are used to pick up the simulated vibrations and turn them into sounds.

Anukari provides polyphony by running up to 16 independent copies of the physics world in parallel. When a MIDI note is pressed, one of the physics worlds is selected, and Anukari applies “time dilation” to the world, speeding or slowing time to produce the correct pitch based on the MIDI note.

Midi Polyphonic Expression (MPE) is fully supported, with the pitch axis mapping smoothly to each world’s time dilation factor to provide real-time pitch bending. The pitch, pressure, and CC#74 axes can all be mapped to custom physics parameters, so for example CC#74 could physically stretch the system out, or change the stiffness of a spring, etc. MPE could be used to create and play a dynamically morphing physical system in real time.

This kind of 3D physics simulation for audio has been done academically in the past, with projects like GENESIS, mi-gen, Tao, and others, but it has always been very experimental and not a commercially available product. Most of the past simulations have been offline (non-realtime) as well, and/or have not had a user-friendly GUI.

Anukari takes the idea of a 3D physics simulation for sound design, and makes it usable fully in real-time by utilizing the user’s graphics card (GPU) for physics computation, and also adds a simple user-friendly interface so that anybody can construct a 3D physics instrument from scratch.

Anukari also is innovative by visualizing the 3D physics simulation completely in real time, with customizable 3D graphics. This could be used to project the visuals during a live performance, or to stream online.

An Anukari instrument can easily have 1,000s of parameters, since the user can create hundreds of physics objects and each one has several parameters that could be modulated. So it is an ideal synthesizer to use with MPE, because the possibilities for expressive control are near-limitless.

As far as I’m aware, there is no other commercially-available synthesizer out there that’s really anything like Anukari.

Anukari launched a week ago and still has a small userbase, but Mick Gordon (the composer for the last couple of very popular DOOM games) made a demo with Anukari that people really enjoyed:

https://x.com/Mick_Gordon/status/1918146487948919222