Five instruments that compose while they play

Noctuary, Ephemeris, Phosphene, Totality and Parhelion each write their music from a seed — the key, the form, every note — and synthesise it in real time. Nothing is played back from a recording: the same seed gives the same piece, and a new one gives a piece nobody has heard.

They share their build, their panel and the hands of a Meta Quest, follow a DAW or an Ableton Link session, send their notes out as MIDI and their stems to outputs of their own, and play together as one band. Free software under the AGPL-3.0.

Noctuary

Ambient and drone

A drone-ambient synthesizer for slowly breathing clusters: just intonation, a conductor that plays all night, distance as the one number that shapes every voice, 24 source types, three reverb tiers, and 14592 presets measured by rendering them.

Consonant Expanse, rendered by Noctuary; pictures by KaleidoscopeEnhanced. Open the video
Consonant Expanse
Somnus Field
Harmonic Hours

Ephemeris

Berlin School

Sequenced modular voices and a composer that plays whole pieces and night sets: eight rows orbiting a root, circuit-modelled filters and VCOs, tape keys, strings and a poly synth, envelopes, LFOs and a modulation matrix on every synth, the room of a tape echo and a long hall.

Cosmic, rendered by Ephemeris; pictures by KaleidoscopeEnhanced. Open the video
Cosmic
Doom
Melodic
Modern
Drift

Phosphene

Psytrance

Complete psytrance sets from a seed, a style and an energy arc — Goa, Full-On, Progressive, Dark Forest and Hi-Tech: key, tempo and form, kick and rolling bass, 303 acid, leads, arpeggios, pads and effects, played through its own synthesizers, mixer and mastering chain.

Goa, rendered by Phosphene; pictures by KaleidoscopeEnhanced. Open the video
Goa
Full-On
Progressive
Dark Forest
Hi-Tech

Totality

Hypnotic techno

Hypnotic Berlin techno: tracks of 32-bar plateaus and whole DJ sets — a kick that hands its phase to the rumble under it, a twelve-lane kit, a bass and a 303 through circuit-modelled filters, the dub chord in its echoes, and a DJ who mixes the tracks into one long recomposition.

Ostgut, rendered by Totality; pictures by KaleidoscopeEnhanced. Open the video
Hypnotic
Ostgut
Dub
Raw Peak

Parhelion

Trance

Trance tracks and DJ sets: the JP-8000 supersaw, a physical piano, a synthesised orchestra, the pump of the ghost kick on every bus — and motifs checked against known tracks, so what it writes is its own.

Uplifting, rendered by Parhelion; pictures by KaleidoscopeEnhanced. Open the video
Uplifting
Progressive
Dream House
Acid
Deep

What they share