Somewhere on an old hard drive there is a folder with really cool sounds I made 15 years ago or so. I remember how good it felt to create and then play them. I remember I was smiling because that sound I created felt so ... wow.
Today, I can't play those sounds anymore. The plugin it was made in no longer runs on my laptop. Nobody else can hear it either. The only copy of that file lived on my hard drive, I did not share it in a forum or anywhere else.
If you have made music with software, you probably have a folder like that somewhere. And that tells a lot about how we treat sounds.
Synthesizer sound is part of our culture
A software synth preset traditionally has two possible homes: Either it's locked inside a plugin you bought a licence for, and it exists only as long as that plugin does. Or it's a file on your own disk, in a format that exactly one application or plugin can read. Neither kind can be shared as easily as providing a link. And neither is guaranteed to outlive the product that it was made for.
That's annoying, but also strange, because synthesized sounds are a part of our culture. That Juno pad, the Oberheim OB-X and the Minimoog bass have been copied, taught, argued about and rebuilt for decades. People learn synthesis by taking apart other people's sounds. Yet the files behind them are treated like the vendor's private property: sealed, unlinkable and disposable.
We don't need another synth
So what's missing isn't a better instrument. It's
Interoperability: A sound should be able to leave the tool it was made in, and work somewhere else.
Sociality: A sound should be something you can easily share, credit, and build upon, not just export.
Both depend on where the data lives and who can read it.
It's the same with social media. Social media didn't need a better photo filter. What it needed was for your content not to be possessed by the platform. The AT Protocol, the network behind Eurosky and Bluesky, is an answer to exactly that, and the great thing is that it works for more than posts.
I cannot take your patches away
ATMOSYNTH is built on those ideas. A patch on ATMOSYNTH is a graph of modules wired together: oscillators, envelopes, filters, samplers, sequencers. A module is itself a small graph of Web Audio nodes, the audio building blocks every modern web browser already implements.
Both are records in their creator's own repository, not on our servers. I cannot take your patches away, even if I wanted to. If ATMOSYNTH disappeared tomorrow, your work wouldn't. That's a different relationship from the one people have with Instagram, Facebook, or the plugin whose presets are gone the day its licence server shuts down.
And every patch has an address. Open it and you can play it, in the browser, with the keyboard on screen, or with a MIDI keyboard plugged in. Nothing to install, no licence needed to listen or to play.
You can play this patch right now in your browser:
From there you can do what synth players have always done with sounds they like: Play it, study it, make it your own and manipulate it, share it with others.
Interoperability between creators and tools
A module I publish can be used in your patch. Your patch pins the exact version it was built with, and a published version never changes, so my next edit can't break your sound. Every module is credited to its author wherever it's used.
The formats are public. A module is a thin layer over nodes that Web Audio already specifies, and we're writing up the rest — how notes are routed, how loops are timed, how voices are shared — as an open spec. The goal: a patch shouldn't need ATMOSYNTH to be played. Any implementation of the spec should do.
Social by default
Nobody has to build a social layer for music making from scratch any more. AT protocol already brings identity, a social graph and portability. You sign in with the account you already have on the Atmosphere.
What ATMOSYNTH adds is social mechanics taylored for sound-making:
Forks are conversations. A fork is a reply in sound, and its lineage shows who answered whom.
Credit is structural. Modules name their authors, and patches name their sources.
Collaboration is live. A patch's creator can invite others to edit it with them. Every change reaches every open canvas, and the patch plays in sync on every device, perfect for live jam sessions over the Internet, on stage, or both. Just look at the following demo:
Try it out
ATMOSYNTH is live at https://atmosynth.at. Today you can:
play any patch in the browser, with the on-screen keyboard or MIDI,
build patches from modules, and build modules from Web Audio nodes (you can even write your own DSP code),
fork any patch and edit it,
perform live together with collaborators.
If you have any feedback, let me know. Send me a DM on Bluesky or mu.social, or a mail to seb@center.for.cybernetic.beauty. Any feedback is welcome!
PS: I'm a synth nerd, so take the heading with a grain of salt. Of course I am excited about every new synth.