Curated software, frameworks and platforms for sound-related practices.
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Tools
sonicLAB
SPATAI is an AI-assisted spatial-motion tool that generates trajectories for up to 64 sound objects in a virtual 3D acoustic space from natural-language prompts. It runs Large Language Models in the cloud or locally via Ollama or LM Studio, supports Cartesian and polar coordinates, and sends OSC or MIDI motion data to third-party spatialisers including IEM, Holophonix, IRCAM Spat, IRCAM Panoramix, L-ISA, TiMax, ADM-OSC, and SPAT Revolution.
sonicPlanet
StarWaves is an audio-visual synthesiser for sonic-architecture and generative sound texture design. It places transmitter, particle, and beam objects in a non-gravitational 3D space whose kinetic interactions trigger granular-level sonic events, with scene capture, animated transitions, MIDI/OSC control, and a parallel VR version, used in sound design, generative music, and immersive composition.
ZKM | Hertz-Lab
Zirkonium is a free macOS toolkit for spatial-audio composition and performance, developed at ZKM | Hertz-Lab Karlsruhe to drive the Klangdom — a 47-loudspeaker dome at the ZKM Kubus. Current version Zirkonium MK3 (since 2015) provides parametric trajectory creation over time, automatic interpolation, event filtering, and real-time rendering on arbitrary 2D or 3D loudspeaker setups. The DSP server is built on Pure Data (libpd) and uses VBAP, Higher-Order Ambisonics (HOA library, CICM), and binau
Audiokinetic
Wwise is an audio middleware suite for interactive media and games. It comprises a graphical authoring tool and a cross-platform sound engine, with components for spatial audio, interactive music, dynamic mixing, and integrated platform support, used in game audio production, automotive sound, and location-based entertainment.
Game Of Life Foundation
WFSCollider is a SuperCollider class library for Wave Field Synthesis spatialisation with a graphical timeline, trajectory editor, and modular Unit Library audio plug-in system. It supports point sources, plane waves, and per-speaker indexing, with sample-accurate scheduling across distributed servers, used in WFS composition and large-scale loudspeaker array performance.
Waves Audio
Waves Nx is a commercial monitoring plug-in that simulates a high-end mixing room over headphones via binaural processing and modelled early reflections. It supports stereo, 5.0/5.1/7.1 surround, and Ambisonic B-format monitoring (Nx Ambisonics component) for 360° and VR work. Real-time head tracking is supported via webcam or the dedicated Nx Head Tracker hardware; the plug-in includes EQ correction profiles for 270+ headphone models based on the Harman Headphone Target Curve.
Epic Games
MetaSounds is the procedural audio system in Unreal Engine 5, providing audio designers with node-graph control over DSP graph generation for sound sources. It supports sample-accurate triggers, runtime modification via the MetaSound Builder API, and integrated spatialization, used in game audio, interactive media, and real-time virtual production.
Unity Technologies
The Unity Audio Spatializer SDK is the free, built-in plug-in framework inside Unity that allows third-party 3D-audio SDKs to spatialise audio sources on a per-AudioSource basis. Unity itself does not ship a built-in spatialiser plug-in, but exposes the spatialiser-plug-in API and an Ambisonic-decoder-plug-in API; spatialiser plug-ins are then provided by third parties (Meta XR Audio SDK, Steam Audio, Resonance Audio, VIVE 3DSP, Microsoft Spatializer, etc.) and selected per project in Project Se
Tone.js community
Tone.js is an open-source JavaScript framework built on the Web Audio API for creating interactive music in the browser. It provides prebuilt synthesizers, effects, samplers, a global transport for event scheduling, and signal-rate building blocks, used for browser-based instruments, generative compositions, music education tools, and interactive sound works.
Outboard
TiMax SoundHub is a commercial 2U hardware spatial audio processor with proprietary FPGA DSP for object-based, dynamic delay-matrix processing. It manages 32×32 or 64×64 channels with Dante or MADI I/O and runs shows autonomously without an attached computer; companion macOS/Windows software (PanSpace, Timeline, Mixer) provides spatial mapping, cue authoring, and show control. Used in theatre, opera, concerts, museums, theme parks, planetariums, and worship venues.
SuperCollider community
SuperCollider is an open-source environment and programming language for real-time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition. It comprises a real-time audio server (scsynth, plus the multi-threaded supernova), an interpreted, object-oriented language (sclang) for controlling the server, and an integrated editor (scide). It is the host platform for the Ambisonic Toolkit (ATK for SuperCollider) and a wide range of HOA UGens, and is widely used in live coding, electroacoustic composition, and spa
Valve Corporation
Steam Audio is a free, open-source cross-platform spatial-audio toolkit developed by Valve. It provides HRTF-based 3D positional audio (with custom-SOFA-file support), Ambisonic spatialisation, physics-based sound propagation modelling occlusion / transmission / reflections / pathing, automated reverb baking based on scene geometry, hybrid reverb for large spaces, and dynamic geometry support. Distributed as integrations for Unity (2017.3+), Unreal Engine (4.27+), FMOD Studio (2.0+), Wwise (2023
