Software engineer and longtime composer of electronic/ambient music Austin Rockman wrote in to share about his open-source interactive audio workstation for macOS that learns the harmonic structure of a sample library.
Trained entirely on synthetic audio (no copyrighted material), Reflector aims to make the process of sample discovery and composition more inspiring, absorbing your sound world and making it navigable across sessions and individual arrangements.
Reflector is an ideation tool for uncovering the myriad harmonic relationships that lie dormant across a sample library. No matter the style you work in, Reflector is made to inspire sample discovery and speed the path to composition. It searches your whole library for sounds that combine and sounds that resemble, and it keeps searching against the arrangement as it grows, so ideation moves quickly and you get to making music faster.
Reflector is currently built for tonal and textural material: pads, keys, strings, synths, guitars, vocals, field recordings with a tonal center, sound design that carries harmony. Reflector does not currently analyze rhythm. I would still encourage experimentation here: even though Reflector does not “beat match” at this time, retrieving against a rhythmic loop might still yield interesting results.
Reflector features
- Index your own sample library and retrieve harmonically compatible audio from any query.
- Two lenses: compatibility (what combines with a sound) and similarity (what resembles it).
- Transposition matches for candidates that fit once pitch-shifted.
- A multi-track timeline with duplication, automatic crossfades, and by-ear transposition.
- Arrangement-aware suggestions that follow your session as it grows.
- A galaxy view mapping your saved sessions by harmonic identity.
- Export the full session to WAV, or stems with placements for your DAW.
The app is available to download for macOS on Apple Silicon.
More information: Reflector
