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Music

The Collidoscope Synthesizer Is Built to be Played by Four People at the Same Time

This crazy granular synth will let you transform audio recordings into beautiful melodies collaboratively.

Two researchers at the Queen Mary of London Centre for Digital Music just unveiled the demo for the Collidoscope, a granular synthesizer that's built to be used by four people at once. For those that need a one-line crash course on granular synthesizers: they record audio samples and allow you to stretch, slice, and loop that source material until tones emerge. Then you can create melodies by controlling the pitch of those tones with a standard piano keyboard.

The Collidoscope is basically a regular granular synthesizer—in that it ingests audio samples and spits out synthesized sound—but with a couple of key twists. First of all, it comes with this huge, beautiful display, so that when you record audio with a microphone you can see a nice juicy depiction of the waveform you're working with. But the real innovation is the simple, tactile interface, which allows you to easily manipulate audio on the fly, and is big enough to allow multiple user to improvise together.

"Think of Collidoscope as a musical microscope that allows you to zoom into sounds and explore their beautiful peculiarities, and in the next moment, to play and perform your sonic discoveries like a musical instrument," the designers explain over on their website. "Collidoscope is designed to be explored in collaboration, and up to four participants can simultaneously collaborate as explorers, sound designers and performers."

You can watch its inventors Ben Bengler and Fiore Martin taking it for a spin in their demo video below.