Splash Alpha – Visual Synth Software ready for Testing

Splash Alpha

Splash Alpha is out for Testers. More Info: http://www.splash.xy01.net/alpha-testing/.

About Splash from Brad Hammond

With Splash the design aim is to create a visual synthesizer, that is at its core, intuitive, exploratory, real time and most of all fun.

This is a program that anyone should be able to pick up, scribble a few lines, twist some dials, mash a few buttons and have something aesthetically interesting come out the other end. The same way that I have fun when playing with my friends music synths, I have no idea how to use them properly but damn do I have fun sitting there mashing the keys, twisting bits, making alien sounds. I want to bring that kind of fun to Splash, along with the deeper ability to fine tune and tweak to create crafted visual compositions.

I would also like to heavily focus on the real time aspect of Splash and what it means. All the visuals are real time rendered, and interactive, but beyond that I want to emphasize real time art as an exhibition of process as much as the final product. The act of creation is an amazing instant and in my opinion needs to be explored more heavily in contemporary digital art.

To this end, and probably not to the liking of everybody I will be experimenting with some strong design choices that will place restrictions on the artist being able to rely too heavily on pre-saved scenes. Hopefully this will encourage, more live improvisation and experimentation, and drive people to stumble across ‘happy accidents’.
In this way, Splash will be somewhat based on similar design principles to one of my favorite sketching programs, Alchemy.
It may take some getting used to but I hope in the long run it proves to be more exciting for people than a hindrance, but this is what we are experimenting to find out.

Additional Splash Documentation.