Image Line Harmor

With the release of Harmor, Image Line is introducing an additive / subtractive synthesizer, image synthesizer as well as audio resynthesizer .

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Additive/Substractive

Like its little brother Harmless, Harmor is driven by an additive synthesis engine. Its modules will look familiar to subtractive synthesizer enthusiasts: oscillators, filters & phasers are featured in Harmor but, because performed through additive synthesis, offer more freedom, according to the company. You don’t just select filter types, you draw them.

Also featured is the multipoint envelope editor, applied to 40 parameters, in 2 independent parts. Through the same envelope/mappings, you can randomize any parameter or link it to key or velocity, and fine-tune each unison voice independently.

Processing units can be rearranged in a semi-modular way.

Image synthesis

Because it typically requires manipulating large amounts (up to 500 per voice) of partials over time, additive synthesis is hard to handle. No human can (or even wants to) edit 500 envelopes, but editing 2D images can be done easily. You can get access to gain & pitch planes which you can tweak in the image editor of your choice, and import a bitmap, even if it wasn’t designed to be turned into audio, it might still sound interesting, Image Line says.

Audio resynthesis

Being an additive synthesizer, Harmor can resynthesize audio files as well. Resynthesis can be tweaked, providing time stretching, pitch shifting, or less conventional manipulations of partials. The result of the analysis can still be turned into an image for further editing.

Image Line says that, while additive synthesis is generally very CPU-consuming, Harmor’s is quite comparable to the one of a subtractive synthesizer.