Murmur8 is a polysynth made from random waveforms. It rolls a new wave for every sound and lets you keep the good ones. A flock of birds follows the wave across the sky.
Five steps from opening Murmur8 to a sound you like. It runs in Chrome, Edge and Safari, on a computer or an iPad.
Controls on the left, the wave on the right. Everything on screen, numbered:
The tabs move to the bottom and the drawer slides up from there, under the wave. To save room, ♪ stands in for keys, and the header keeps to one row: edit, hide ui, fly, view, the preset arrows and the random patch button all move into ⋯, and the volume fader stays in the header. Everything else is the same.
The sound is one wave. Murmur8 draws one cycle of a waveform through a handful of random key points, and plays that cycle over and over at the pitch of each note. Change the points and you change the sound. The shape tab sets how many points there are, how they sit and how the line runs between them.
The wave can change while you play. generate picks new points and mutate moves the ones you have. Drift mutates by itself every so often, and inertia sets how slowly the wave travels to its new shape. Notes don't click while it moves. That's the motion tab.
Each note has a filter and an envelope. Murmur8 plays eight notes at once, and the contour tab shapes how each one opens, holds and fades.
Mods and drones keep it moving. Five slow modulators can move almost any control (mod). Four held drone voices, each with a wave of its own, wander under what you play (drone).
The effects show in the sky. Drive, squash, phaser, resonator, tape delay and reverb are on the fx tab. Reverb shows as mist and shimmer as flashes of light. When you stop playing, the birds settle in the reeds.
Four ways in: MIDI, the computer keys, the keys on screen, and Murmur8 playing itself.
Plug in a MIDI keyboard and play. Murmur8 starts out listening to every MIDI input, and picks up devices you plug in later. ⋯ shows what it can hear (midi · Keystation 49). Tap that row to choose: off, all inputs or one device from the list. Murmur8 remembers your choice in this browser.
The middle row plays a white key on each letter and the row above plays the black keys, like a piano: a is C, w C♯, s D, and so on up to ' (F, an octave and a bit up). z and x move down and up an octave. ⋯ shows which octave you're in.
Tap ♪ keys for a one-octave keyboard on screen. Play with several fingers and slide between keys. Where you touch matters: lower on a key plays louder. ‹ › beside it change the octave.
On touch screens the keys are on to begin with; Murmur8 remembers whether you leave them on.
fly lets Murmur8 play by itself: short phrases, then a rest, in a scale built on the drone's root note and in time with the clock. Each note shows as a ring in the sky, and the birds rise where it lands. Play along, or change the wave while it plays.
fly speed, in motion under the clock, sets how often fly may play a note: every 1/8 (the way it always played), 1/4, 1/2 or 1 bar. The slower settings leave more room between notes. It is yours rather than the preset's, so it stays as you set it.
With the controls hidden (hide ui), tapping the sky plays a note too, and each tap comes back every four bars, a little quieter each time, five times. Bringing the controls back (or panic) stops the echoes that haven't played yet.
The right-hand side of the screen: the wave and the buttons that change it.
A completely new wave: new points, with all your settings kept.
Moves the points you have, by the amount set in motion. Small amounts keep the character; large ones head somewhere new.
The last 32 waves. Each generate, mutate or drawn line adds one; drift doesn't, so it can't fill the list. Going back and then generating drops the waves after it.
Freezes the wave: generate, mutate, drift and mutate on note all leave it alone. Everything else still moves, including mods on the shape controls.
Lock a wave you love before you roll random patches: ⚄ then keeps the wave and changes only the settings.One cycle of the wave, with its key points. Where it's heading shows as a faint line while it glides.
What you hear, like an oscilloscope, steadied on the lowest note you're holding.
Left channel against right. A thin line is mono; the wider it opens, the wider the stereo (detune and the drone spread it).
No wave, only the sky. The wave box goes, and generate, mutate and the rest sit in one row along the bottom, so the sky and the controls get the room. Handy in a small window. ✎ edit hides, as there's no wave to draw. Pick a view from view in the header, or press v to step through the four. Murmur8 remembers the one you left on.
Draw the wave by hand, on the cycle view:
Your first touch turns the wave into points you can move without changing how it sounds. Generate, mutate, drift and history all still work on a drawn wave.
Only the sky is left, and the sound carries on. Tap the sky to play notes (see fly). To bring the controls back, press i or touch with two fingers.
The wave itself: how many points, how they sit, the line between them, and its colour.
How many key points the wave has. Few points: simple, round, hollow tones. Many: busy, bright, buzzy ones. Most of the slider covers 2 to 10.
How the points are spaced along the cycle: evenly, or bunched and gappy.
How far each point's height jumps from the last. Low chaos gives gentle hills; high chaos, jagged peaks.
The line between the points: steps at the bottom, then straight lines, then curves, then smoothed towards a sine at the top. The single biggest change to the tone.
Adds copies of the wave at higher harmonics, for a fuller, organ-like sound.
Pulls those harmonics out of tune into a bell or metal bar. Only does something when harmonics is up.
A vowel filter, swept from “a” through to “u”. It doesn't follow the note, so it sounds like a voice.
Two extra copies of each note, slowly drifting out of tune and spread left and right. A little is warm; a lot is seasick.
Folds the wave back on itself where it would go too high: bright, rattly harmonics, more as you turn it up.
Offsets the fold so the top and bottom fold differently, for a reedier, harder edge. Even in the middle.
How the wave changes on its own, blending between sounds, and the clock.
One puck for two controls: up for more mutate, right for more inertia. It pulses each time drift fires.
How much a mutate (and each drift) changes the wave.
How slowly the wave travels to its new shape. At snap it jumps; up high, a new wave takes seconds to arrive and you hear it morph.
Mutates the wave by itself, over and over. Quick on the left, slow on the right. Slow drift with high inertia is the easiest way to a sound that never quite repeats.
Every note you play mutates the wave a little, so no two notes are quite the same.
Drift fires on the beat instead, and its slider counts in bars and beats, short on the left and long on the right.
Blend between up to four whole sounds. Tap an empty corner (or capture sound to A–D) to store what you're hearing, change things, capture another, then drag the puck between them. The wave and the settings blend; switches like the filter type follow the nearest corner.
clear empties all four. Mods, volume and tempo stay out of it, so a mod can move the puck (superposition x and y are destinations).
Capture a dark sound and a bright one in opposite corners, then point a slow mod at superposition x.The clock everything synced follows: synced drift, synced mods, the synced delay and fly. ⋯ shows the tempo, and tapping that row takes you here. The line above it says where the tempo comes from: internal or midi clock.
Tap it in time, two or more times, to set the tempo.
When MIDI clock arrives, it takes over from the tempo slider; when it stops, the slider is back in charge.
The filter and the envelope, as two graphs you drag.
Low-pass (darker), band-pass (thinner, vocal) or high-pass (brighter, no bass).
Drag the handle: left and right is cutoff (20 Hz to 20 kHz), up and down is resonance. The shaded hill behind it is what's playing right now. A dashed line shows where the envelope sweeps it, and a coloured one where a mod has moved it. Double-tap to reset.
Where the filter starts cutting. A mod destination too.
A peak at the cutoff; high values whistle.
How far each note's envelope opens the filter (or, below the middle, closes it). The main control for plucky versus soft.
Three handles shape every note: the first sets attack, the second decay (sideways) and sustain (up and down), the last release. Double-tap to reset.
How long a note takes to arrive.
How long it takes to fall to the sustain level.
The level it holds while the key is down. At zero, every note is a pluck.
How long it rings after you let go.
One note at a time. Play a note while another is held and it slides there without starting again. Let go and it slides back to the note you are still holding. Fly keeps its own notes.
How long the slide takes. Shows when legato is on.
Five slow modulators. Point one at a control and it moves it for you.
Each row is one mod. When it's on, the control it moves shows a coloured ring on its slider and a small dot by its name, and the tab it lives on gets a line.
Off keeps its settings, so you can try a sound with and without it.
∿ sine, ⋀ tri, ⊓ square (flips between two values), ⟋ ramp, ⁘ s&h (a new random value each cycle) and 〰 wander (glides smoothly between random values, so the movement never repeats).
What it moves, grouped by tab: anything in shape and contour, inertia, mutate, drift, superposition x and y, the drone's character, most of the fx, and pitch for vibrato.
Locks the mod to the clock; rate becomes division, from 16 bars to 1/32.
How fast it cycles, when it's not synced. Most of Murmur8's best sounds use slow rates, from a few seconds to a few minutes.
The length of one cycle, in bars and beats, when synced.
How far it moves the control, either way round. Zero is the middle.
Up to four held notes of their own, under whatever you play. Each voice has its own wave that wanders on its own clock; the shape settings are shared.
Starts or fades out the drone.
Each note you play moves the drone's root to that note (in the same octave), so it follows your harmony. Notes from fly don't move it.
The drone's root note, a semitone or an octave at a time. Fly's scale is built on it too.
The whole drone's volume.
How slowly it fades in and out.
How often each voice's wave changes by itself. Still on the left, then slow, then faster as you go right.
Pulls the voices' waves towards the main wave. Free, they each go their own way; locked, they follow what you're playing.
Slow swells in each voice's level and position, so the drone moves around you.
Darkens or brightens the upper voices against the lower ones.
Adds breathy air that comes and goes in gusts.
Each voice can be on or off. A voice you turn on starts close to the main wave.
The voice's pitch against the root, named where it helps (5th, octave, oct+M3…).
That voice's volume.
Every voice glides back towards the main wave, to start wandering again from there.
Drive and squash work on the whole instrument; the phaser sweeps; resonator, delay and reverb are sends you mix in.
Saturates the whole instrument, from warmth to grit.
Then compresses it, from gentle glue to flat and dense.
Sweeps notches through the sound. Mix at zero is off; rate runs from one sweep every 33 s to 6 a second; feedback makes it sharper and more metallic.
Rings with each note you play, tuned to it, like a string or bar struck in sympathy. Decay runs from 0.2 to 20 s.
What the resonator is made of.
Ping-pong echoes. Feedback sets how many come back; tone goes from dark to bright.
The echo time. Change it while it's echoing and the pitch bends, like tape. sync sets it in note lengths from the clock instead (division).
Tape wobble on the echoes.
The room. Decay runs from 0.4 s to 40 s. It shows in the sky as mist.
Feeds the reverb back an octave up, so the tail climbs in pitch. Shows as flashes of light in the sky.
Holds the reverb tail forever. Play a chord, freeze it, and play over the top.
About thirty factory sounds in four banks: keys & plucks, pads, drones and textures. Your own go in yours.
Type a name under save current sound and press save. Saving with the same name again overwrites it; ✕ deletes one. Factory names are taken.
A preset holds every setting, the mods, the wave's key points, the drone and the superposition corners. It doesn't hold the volume or the tempo.
Copies the current sound as a line of text starting murmur:. Paste it into a message, a note, anywhere.
Paste a murmur: code and load code to hear it.
Saves all your presets as murmur-presets.json.
Adds the presets from a file. Ones with the same name are replaced.
⋯ › scene sets the picture behind the wave.
The landscape, or plain black (easier on a dark stage, and lighter on the battery).
The flock that follows the wave. still keeps them in place.
Changes play out like a time-lapse. day passes runs a whole day in 15 minutes; your clock follows the time where you are.
Starting points. Begin from init (the first preset) unless it says otherwise.
You hear four held notes that slowly change tone and move around the stereo field. For a darker version, set tilt to top darker 40%.
The chord keeps ringing under the melody. Press freeze again to let it fade. Try it with the drone on.
You hear a struck metal tone that rings on. For a glass sound, set stretch back to 50%.
The sound moves between the two by itself. Capture a third sound in B and point mod 2 at superposition y.
The chord brightens, darkens and softens on its own. Turn on sync on both mods to tie the movement to the tempo.
You hear your own shape, and it stays put while you change everything else. Turn smoothness up and down to hear the same points with steps, lines and curves between them.
Also in ⋯ › keys and tips. On sliders: drag (hold shift for fine), double-tap to reset, scroll, or use the arrow keys.
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
| a w s … ' | play notes, from C |
| z x | octave down, up |
| space | generate |
| m | mutate |
| [ ] | history back, forward |
| r | random patch |
| b | ✎ edit the wave, on or off |
| v | next view: cycle, scope, x / y, none |
| i | hide ui, show it again |
| ` | hide or show the drawer |
| 1 … 5 | mod 1–5 on or off |
| esc | close a menu, or all notes off |
In this guide, / jumps to find.
Murmur8 is coming to iPad and iPhone as an app and as an Audio Unit (AUv3) plug-in. It's the same instrument: everything in this guide applies. What's different is how it fits in with other apps. Each update's changes are listed in what's new.
Add Murmur8 as an instrument in a host such as AUM, Logic Pro, GarageBand or Loopy Pro. In a host:
Tap begin (or any key): browsers stay silent until you do. Check vol at the top, your device's volume and, on an iPad or iPhone, the silent switch or Control Centre's mute. Then play a note, or tap fly.
If it played before and has stopped, panic (esc) and play again, or reload the page.
Use Chrome or Edge (Safari has no MIDI). ⋯ shows the MIDI status: no devices means it can't see the keyboard (check the cable and that no other app has it), and off means you or a past visit chose off (tap the row and pick the keyboard or all inputs), blocked means permission was refused (allow MIDI in the site settings and reload).
Press panic or esc. If it's a long, slow sound, it may be the drone (turn it off in drone), a frozen reverb (freeze) or a long release (contour).
That's drift (motion), mutate on note, a mod, or fly. To keep a wave exactly as it is, press lock.
They're stored in the browser you made them in, so they won't appear in another browser, a private window or another device, and clearing site data removes them. Use export file to keep a copy, and import file to bring them back.
Close other tabs and apps, and try fewer notes at once. Drone voices, high entanglement and lots of mods all cost a little. Black background (⋯ › scene) and none view take load off the screen.
Once it has loaded, it doesn't need the internet: nothing is sent anywhere, and it makes no network requests.
Not inside the web version yet. Record your computer's output with an audio app, or use the iPad plug-in in a host that records.
Something missing or wrong? Email support@tinkerhaus.xyz, or see support.
Murmur8 is inspired by an idea in Omnitone's ROSCI: drawing a single cycle of a waveform through random points.