Våld Labs has opened the public beta of Kurare, a 16-voice polyphonic swarm synthesizer plugin in which every note is built from two swarms of coupled oscillators, playable anywhere between a single fused tone and a drifting cloud. It is built on the Kuramoto model of collective synchronization, first described by physicist Yoshiki Kuramoto in 1975.
Features:
- Each note contains two swarms of coupled oscillators, red and white, with up to 32 oscillators in each.
- Four macro controls define each swarm:
- POPULATE sets how many oscillators are alive, from 1 to 32.
- DECOUPLE sets the coupling strength, from a phase-locked choir through beating and breathing textures to a free-running cloud.
- DIVERGE spreads pitches into sub-octave and overtone layers. A two-phase oscillator core keeps this spread alive at full coupling, so phases can lock while pitches stay fanned.
- EXCITE adds deterministic noise to phase and pitch, agitating the swarm at the edge of synchronization.
- The swarm disc at the centre of the interface shows the actual oscillators of the note being played, driven by the engine’s own phases: a cloud at low coupling, a lattice when locked.
- Each swarm reads its own wavetable “road” of 127 single-cycle frames sorted by spectral brightness. Five collections are included: Procedural (additive frames generated from the bank seed), Classical (sine, saw, square and reverse saw), Vox (vocal and formant frames), Acoustic (plucked, bowed and blown) and Digital (PWM, folded and gritty spectra).
- WAVE X and WAVE Y select two positions on the road and RATIO mixes them by interference, with the frames quarter-phase-shifted before summing so no mix position thins out.
- SPLIT keeps each swarm on its own frame; BLND fuses both swarms into one shared wave.
- Each swarm has its own filter with two characters to choose from: an SEM-inspired state-variable filter morphing from low-pass through band-pass and notch to high-pass, or a Polivoks-inspired low-pass/band-pass with clipping inside the resonance loop.
- Three LFOs and two generative MOD lanes can each be routed to any parameter on the panel. MUTUAL couples the two swarms to each other, octave controls transpose each swarm whole, and MIDI CC learn is available throughout.
- The onboard sequencer is derived from Vekte, the studio’s generative MIDI sequencer. It offers seven algorithms, from wave interference to Kaprekar and Fibonacci, one part per swarm, an arpeggiator, scale and chord quantizing, DENSE thinning, swing and humanize, also present in Tresse.
- Multi Delay, Bitcrusher, Distortion, and Reverb effects including Shimmer.
The engine is deterministic: stateless seeded hashes, pinned math and a fixed internal rate mean the same patch and notes produce bit-identical audio on any machine. Every patch can be exported as a short share key (with QR code) and pasted into any copy of Kurare, and a factory preset bank is included.
Kurare is free while in Beta. iOS soon available for testing.
YouTube.com/watch?v=MOqTOCwYRDk
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