by Jack Freudenheim

I created Sounder after being inspired by a genre of music called ambient music. Generally speaking, ambient music can be described as minimalist, somewhat hypnotic music using synthesizers and samplers, in which small changes take place over long periods of time.

What struck me was that this kind of music is limited when distributed as "hard copy" — whether on a CD or even as an audio file on an iPod — because it never changes. Rather, it seems to be suited to be software-based, so that a piece of music's content need never be the same twice and its length open-ended.

At the same time, I was struck by the fact that with the growing popularity of multimedia in PCs, many computers are now equipped with sound cards that adhere to the General MIDI spec, yet most people use them only for playing CD-ROMs or games (the exception being musicians who use specialized software like sequencers, and MIDI playback programs like PC-Karaoke).

With this in mind, I created Sounder.

I feel that Sounder creates a niche of interactive music-making software exploiting the capabilities of those sound cards, generating music that creates sound environments for the user/listener. Similar to screen-savers, the user would be entertained by the output of the program, yet while screen-savers only kick in when the user leaves the computer idle, Sounder can play in the background while the user is working. I sometimes describe Sounder as a "musical lava lamp."

Sounder is graphical as well as musical. The actual composition of the musical environments takes place by manipulating animated objects and resizing the windows they inhabit. We have received very positive feedback from musicians and non-musicians about Sounder. Non-musicians especially appreciate "seeing" a representation of the music taking place in time.

The beautiful animated Sounder objects that come with Sounder were created by Christopher Masciocchi, a brilliant New York computer artist. More of his Soundimations were posted for free download. You could create your own Soundimations by combining a series of bitmaps into a single "filmstrip"-like single bitmap, and adding it to your Soundimation database.

Awards & Recognition

Sounder's ground-breaking concept won an award in the New Voices, New Visions competition sponsored by TheVoyager Company, Paul Allen's Interval Research, and Wired Magazine. Over a year in the making, and after testing by thousands of beta testers from over 50 countries, Sounder was released to the general public.

Using Sounder with Software Synthesizers

If you use your own music software like Propellerhead's Reason or Record, Ableton Live, or any other sequencer/DAW with built-in synthesis or sample-playback, you can use a MIDI router like Midi Yoke to route the MIDI output of Sounder into the synth. The MIDI notes that Sounder sends out will go to your synth of choice, which you can then treat with reverb, echo or other effects for truly wonderful atmospheric ambient music. The possibilities are endless.

If you press "record" in that program's sequencer, you can save the music you've created into a retrievable MIDI sequence, which you could then edit or manipulate.