Taking Whooshes To A New Level: A Q&A About Soundmorph's Wave Warper

Posted October 29, 2013 by Asbjoern Andersen in New sound effects libraries, SFX interview

I just spoke with Soundmorph’s Jason Cushing about Wave Warper, a new sound design tool that has just been released:

What is Wave Warper exactly?

Wave Warper is a real-time controllable sample layering software that applies concepts of doppler, pitching, panning, filtering and other effects to create user controlled whooshes and passbys.

And, to my knowledge, this is the first available software for controlling and making whooshes.

One thing I think lacks big time in sound design tools in general is user control. Being able to easily play and control aspects of a sound, to be able to perform it.

The built-in XY pad and leap motion control option in Wave Warper make it feel very user controlled, which just feels great to use, and gives your sounds a human feel to them too.

Not only that, but you can load a folder of SFX or Samples and randomize them quickly, so if you don’t like what you have loaded, it’s no problem to quickly load some new sounds directly from your library, it takes only a split second.

Also, I love that you can load up to 10 VSTs right within Wave Warper throughout the signal flow chain… so at any point you can load up your favourite VST.

How did you come up with the idea for it?

We had been reading posts and tutorials on making whooshes, and there was great stuff out there actually. Not only some great sample libraries, but great ideas. We loved Jedsound’s Kyma Patch! Yan at SoundMorph has a Kyma, but most people out there don’t.

Kyma is awesome, but it’s also quite expensive and a bit tricky to wrap your head around as it uses its own language. After we finished Galactic Assistant, we thought it would be great to focus on making a whoosh software that everyone could use.

How long have you been working on it?

Actually longer than we had thought it would take! We started around last June. So, I guess 5 or 6 months in the making.

Yan Doiron, my partner at SoundMorph, is the main creator, I co-created it with ideas about features, layout, look of it, signal flow, but Yan is the Max/MSP genius. It takes a long time to come up with all of that.

Also to design the user interface is quite tricky. You want it to look cool, but you also want it to be functional and readable for the user. Jeremie, our Web Designer and awesome graphics partner, worked with us to create the look and brand of it.

Well, actually he did most all of it! We just gave ideas. :)

What does it take to run it?

It is a standalone application that runs on most Mac and PC configurations, the system requirements are not all that demanding.

Some people love that our software is standalone and others would really prefer we make VSTs or DAW plugins… and they curse at us! Ha, kidding, well we would love to make VSTs actually, but it’s not quite as simple as some might think.

You need an advanced background in programming to make VSTs, and Max/MSP does not currently support exporting to VSTs. But they do support exporting to standalone applications.
Anyhow, we would love to make VSTs someday! Just takes some time to learn.

The nice thing is you can record your performances in Wave Warper directly in the App, and press stop, and save a .WAV or .AIFF. So it’s fast to create files.

When’s it coming out?

You can get it right here.

Thanks to Jason Cushing, co-founder of SoundMorph for taking the time for this Q&A

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