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Telepathic Instruments shared this sneak preview for Orchid, an advanced chord generating hardware synthesizer that they say is “developed for songwriters, producers and musicians to expand the possibilities of songwriting and musical exploration”.

According to Telepathic Instruments, Orchid was first envisioned by Kevin Parker over 10 years ago. The design of the instrument itself has been developed by company co-founder Ignacio Germade.

“Orchid isn’t just about how much you know or don’t know – it’s about shaking up your creative process,” says Charl Laubscher, another of Telepathic Instruments’ co-founders. “It’s a tool for anyone who wants to step outside their musical comfort zone, to experiment and to find what’s on their mind.”

Pitched as being ‘made for chords’ Orchid is a 16-voice digital polysynth that features three distinct synth engines designed by Stefan Stenzel, best known for his work with Waldorf. These offer a virtual analogue subtractive synth, an FM synth engine, and a vintage reed piano emulation. The FM and VA engines each have four oscillators, four LFOs, four envelope generators and a filter.

The synth also features onboard reverb, chorus and delay effects. As well as letting users assign a sound for the main chords, Orchid also has a separate bass synth engine that will generate sound solely for the low-end.

The most interesting aspect of Orchid, however, is its distinctive chord generation system. This is based around a matrix of chord type and chord modifying keys, paired with a single octave keyboard used to dictate the root note of the chord. The central rotary can then be used to repitch and reposition chords, which can then be played back in a number of ways, using the Strum, Slop, Arpeggiator, Pattern and Harp functions. Then you can add a separate bass part and effects to flesh out your idea.

According to its creators, “This process effectively expands the potential of the chords to an entire piano’s key set, not just the 12 keys found on the unit.”

Orchid’s hardware has a unique and stylish design, and also features a number of modern conveniences. There’s a stereo pair of built-in speakers, plus a rechargeable onboard battery. The single octave keyboard is also velocity sensitive.

The Orchid is expected to be available in December 2024, priced at $549. Details are still to come at the Telepathic Instruments site.

Today, semiconductor manufacturer and the world’s most valuable company NVIDIA shared a preview of Fugatto, an AI-powered audio tool that they describe as “the World’s Most Flexible Sound Machine”.

Fugatto is intended to be a sort of Swiss Army Knife for audio, letting you generate or transform any mix of music, voices and sounds using just text prompts.

“Fugatto is our first step toward a future where unsupervised multitask learning in audio synthesis and transformation emerges from data and model scale,” says composer & NVIDIA researcher Rafael Valle.

Official teaser video:

Like earlier generative audio demos, many of the audio examples in their promo seem primitive. On the other hand, this is first generative AI demo that we’ve seen that also showcases the tool being used in interesting creative ways.

For example, the video demonstrates how you can use text prompts with Fugatto to extract vocals from a mix, morph one sound into another, generate realistic speech, remix existing audio, and convert MIDI melodies into realistic vocal samples. These are capabilities that c0uld actually complement and extend the capabilities of the current generation of digital audio workstations.

What they have to say about the technology behind Fugatto:

“Fugatto is a foundational generative transformer model that builds on the team’s prior work in areas such as speech modeling, audio vocoding and audio understanding.

The full version uses 2.5 billion parameters and was trained on a bank of NVIDIA DGX systems packing 32 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs.

Fugatto was made by a diverse group of people from around the world, including India, Brazil, China, Jordan and South Korea. Their collaboration made Fugatto’s multi-accent and multilingual capabilities stronger.

One of the hardest parts of the effort was generating a blended dataset that contains millions of audio samples used for training. The team employed a multifaceted strategy to generate data and instructions that considerably expanded the range of tasks the model could perform, while achieving more accurate performance and enabling new tasks without requiring additional data.

They also scrutinized existing datasets to reveal new relationships among the data. The overall work spanned more than a year.”

We’ve got questions about Fugatto, ranging from “When will Fugatto become a real thing?” to “Will the data centers needed to power Fugatto generate enough heat to bring ocean-front views to the Midwest?”

But, with this demo, we can see a paradigm-shift coming in how musicians work with audio – where text-based and spoken commands become an important part of musician’s toolkits.

We may have been optimistic on that timetable. But it’s clear that – for at least younger musicians – we’re heading for an era where the ‘virtual studio’ paradigm of current DAWs may not be relevant anymore. For someone new to music production, being able to remix audio and arrange music using voice commands will make it much easier to get started with music production.

And, for those that have invested years in developing skills with audio software – it’s clear that new audio tools are coming, very quickly, that promise to let us work with audio in new ways. It seems inevitable that some of the capabilities demonstrated in this video will be integrated into the next generation of digital audio workstations.

Is generative audio about to get interesting for creative musicians? Or are you sick of hearing about how AI is going to get awesome? Share your thoughts in the comments!

German synth maker Fred’s Lab let us know that the Manatee, a 4- part, 16- voice digital synthesizer based on spectral synthesis is now available.

Each voice features 2x oscillators, an advanced noise and ring modulator, a multimode resonant filter with an extra “RC” section, a saturator module, 2x meta-envelopes + 1x custom-LFO and a classic modulation matrix.

A first look at the Manatee, via Les Sondiers. The video is in French, but has lots of audio demos:

Features:

• The Manatee offers up to 16 voices (preset dependent), 4 parts and a “selection of carefully hand crafted audio algorithms”.
• Extensive and well-documented MIDI implementation with expressive MIDI support.
• Unique spectral engine – a blend between additive and wavetable synthesis.
• Manatee also includes Virtual Analog, Waveform and 2-Operator FM algorithms to either complement the spectral oscillator or to be used solo.
• Each modulation source can target many parameters and the intensity of the modulation be controlled by any available expressor (MIDI CC, Aftertouch…).
• Each part carries the spectral maker, 2x custom-LFOs, a time based effect module with delays, comb filters and finally 2x adjustable stereo equalizers.
• Reverb is also available as an insert effect.

More audio demos are available at the Fred’s Lab site.

The Manatee is available now, priced at €899.00 w/ VAT. The manufacturer’s site lists it as sold out for 2024, but refers interested parties to its dealers.