New Synth, DSP Motion, Lets You ‘Draw’ The Movement Of Sounds

Tsugi has introduced DSP Motion, a new app that lets you create animated sounds, by ‘drawing them’ with a mouse or a graphic tablet.

The developers say that the app is designed for things like adding a sonic dimension to animated logos, character and environment animations, visual effects, user interfaces, YouTube videos and more.

The workflow is immediate: select a type of motion (e.g. rotation, scaling, transformation), an audio style (e.g. fire, electricity, machine, animal), and draw a sound effect. While drawing, the position of the mouse or stylus, the speed of the movement and other properties are evaluated to generate a sound effect that perfectly matches the user’s motion.

The sound generation is  based on a procedural audio engine, so the sound generation is customizable. Each audio style provides many control and synthesis parameters. Should the length of a sequence or animation change, the sound duration can be adjusted without requiring any new audio recording or editing, and without introducing any audio artifacts (unlike with the time-stretching of samples).

Procedural audio also allows for the automatic generation of many sound variations, which can be used to avoid repetitiveness in games and animation.

DSP Motion saves its sounds as wave files. These sounds can also be exported towards the Unity game engine or sent to another audio tool, directly from within DSP Motion.

Pricing and Availability

DSP Motion is available now for US $49 (EUR 36, GBP 29).

23 thoughts on “New Synth, DSP Motion, Lets You ‘Draw’ The Movement Of Sounds

    1. Just bought it, as a sound designer for animated movies, this tool is simply *fantastic*. I can imagine musicians / game designers creating layers for intricate ambiences as well, although I haven’t used it for that yet.

  1. I assume you can load your own samples. If so, this is a remarkable tool to add spatial dimensions to a synth performance. Audiences appear to expect more 3D spatial effects these days.

    1. I don’t know the answer but I’d assume the other way around since they mention “procedural audio engine” multiple times. Think they mean to say “all of the sounds are generated via synthesis parameters so any of those parameters can be automated via the drawing interface”. Could be quite fun with samples though!

      1. I think you are right for DSP Motion. Although they have another tool (GameSynth) which is mostly a procedural audio tool as well but still allows you to draw with your own samples in various ways. One of them, the Particles synth is absolutely brilliant.

    1. These programs are trying to achieve different things though, and TC-11 is limited to the iPad. This works on any PC. The drawing experience in DSP Motion is simply fabulous.You really feel how your movement, its speed etc.. affect the sound being generated. It feels natural and this is very gratifying.

      1. Yar. TC-11 is a (n amazing) musical instrument that uses a 2D surface for creating/performing music. This seems entirely focused on creating/performing sound cues with sonic movement to match video.

  2. Looks like a ton of fun.

    Tasteful or Useful? Who knows, who cares, at this point anything that gets me having fun with music has its own special utility.

  3. I bought it and it’s pretty cool but it does have some breaking bugs that kind of make it useless for me. Everytime I render a file my entire systems lags to a halt even after closing the program and I have to restart my machine. The interface will move if you click and drag on it anywhere which is normally fine but with a piece of software built around clicking and dragging, this can be kind of annoying cause you end up flinging the window across your desktop. There are some other random crashes and errors, I’ll probably write the company soon. I also wish there was a way to sync this to Midi or another sort of clock because its really hard to sync it to any video in a practical sense, cause it’s standalone.

    1. We have their whole DSP Series at the office and it is rock-solid. You should definitely contact them. Once I had a question and they literally replied 5 minutes later! I guess that s Japanese service for you… My guess is you may have some older lib / driver or something.

    2. Pretty solid here, and an absolutely gorgeous tool. Bought it after seeing a review on the Cakewalk forums and the guy was right; it’s a pleasure to use and it feels very natural. The link between mouse movement, drawing, and sound generation is extremely well done. Definitely will get a lot of use here to create layers.

  4. Going back to this comments after they got busted in a more recent article for doing the exact same you can CLEARLY tell who are the developers commenting… I’ve never seen a single Synthtopia users saying words such as “gorgeous”, “fabulous” or “phenomenal” to describe a tool for non musical applications. I’ve been reading this site daily for almost 6 years now… Nice try guys LMAO

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