Tech Lounge
00:02:29 · Evan Mezeske, Chris Chinchilla
[00:02:29] S1: I was not. Yeah. I wish I was there, but I have not yet made it to Superbooth. [00:02:34] S0: It would be very much the scene, but I I paid to bookmarked it about that time. So I don't know what I was looking at. [00:02:43] S1: Was that this year? [00:02:44] S0: Yeah. I think like May or something. Were you in Sound on Sound maybe? I don't know. Who knows? Either way, it's actually quite rare and quite pleasant when someone messages me for an interview who I've actually like, Oh, I actually know you, great. So I've actually been thinking to check this out because I am making music again for the first time in a while and experimenting with a lot of things. And what you're doing is kind of fascinating. But let's just go back a step because I think you're ex Google, ex Alphabet engineer? [00:03:20] S1: Yeah. Yeah. I worked at Google for something like eleven years, mostly working on not music related stuff. It was fraud and abuse. [00:03:28] S0: It's quite [00:03:29] S1: Mostly stopping stopping the fraud and abuse. I have to I have to be specific. I wasn't perpetrating fraud and abuse. [00:03:34] S0: Oh, you know.
00:03:34 · Chris Chinchilla, Evan Mezeske
[00:03:34] S0: Oh, you know. [00:03:35] S1: But it it was fun. I got to think like one of those people. Yeah. That was what I enjoyed about that job. But, I had a lot of fun doing that. I felt pretty good about the work we did, you know, like preventing nasty hate speech from being monetized with ads or whatever. But, yeah, I was getting a little burned out by the end. Pretty pretty happy to be working on something that's like way more about my interests than, you know, Google's interests. [00:04:00] S0: And so you had interest in music or music technology at least for a while? [00:04:05] S1: Yeah. Yeah. I'm a lifelong amateur musician, primarily a guitarist, but, you know, all kinds of stuff. And and just as a hobby, I've produced music, you know, my whole life, but it's never been like a professional thing, at least on the performance side. And, you know, historically, I spent a lot of time as a software engineer just making fun little demos and apps and stuff on the side on the weekends and stuff. Mhmm. And at one point, I had built, like, sort of the proto proto proto Anukari and thought, oh, that's a cool idea, and then never thought about it again for ten years. And when I was thinking about what to do after Google, that idea came back up and, hey, I should try that.
00:04:45 · Chris Chinchilla, Evan Mezeske
[00:04:45] S0: Okay. Let's maybe talk about what it is. And then I would actually love to know a little bit more about how you make an audio plugin because it's something that's been on my mind. There's a couple of really good meetups here. One is the audio developers meetup. One is like a music tech. There's a lot of music software makers in Germany in general, but also in Berlin, we have Ableton Native Instruments. I had a guy here last week who makes a VJ tool, and we were actually jamming with it together. So there's a lot of people here. So I'm very interested in the process, but let's talk about what it is. You describe it as a three d physics synthesizer, build your own synths and effects. Now, anyone who comes from this world knows that there's some standard ways you can build synthesizers with, what is it, the ASMR? No? ASDR ASDR type ways you can basically make any kind of sound through these combinations of waves, and that's how many sounds are modeled. So what what is... What are you doing instead? [00:05:49] S1: Yeah. I... So I have a friend who's, like, really into modular synthesis, which I I I never got super deep into I'd love to, but, you know, I have enough, like, guitar [00:06:01] S0: I don't think I want to, to be honest with you. It's it's too much of a rabbit hole. [00:06:04] S1: Very dangerous. But I have a friend who's super into that, and he saw Anukari and he was like, oh, it's modular but for physics. [00:06:11] S0: Okay.
00:06:11 · Chris Chinchilla, Evan Mezeske
[00:06:11] S0: Okay. [00:06:12] S1: And that was never a description that occurred to me, but I I think it's really helpful. So it's... You know, the idea is it's like this physical modeling synthesizer, and you're building these, like, physical objects out of really simple components, you know, these, like, abstract masses and springs and other things like that. And then, you know, after you build that system of masses and springs, if you were to introduce energy into that system, it's gonna vibrate in some way, and you can turn that vibration into sound. [00:06:40] S0: Yeah. [00:06:41] S1: And so, yes, Anukari is just this thing that lets you, you know, construct these whatever kind of physical contraption you might want to simulate, and then it will play that out, and you can hear what it sounds like. [00:06:54] S0: And I'm kind of looking at some screenshots here. I haven't actually tried it yet. Maybe I should have. I've making a lot of music the past week. Maybe I should have. But we've kind of... Actually, the interface to me looks a bit like some of these visualization tools that I've been playing with, that you drag these shapes in. You have a MIDI keyboard. So it's a bit of me that makes me think it's like Visualizer meets something like Max for Live. I don't know.
00:06:54 · Chris Chinchilla, Evan Mezeske
[00:06:54] S0: And I'm kind of looking at some screenshots here. I haven't actually tried it yet. Maybe I should have. I've making a lot of music the past week. Maybe I should have. But we've kind of... Actually, the interface to me looks a bit like some of these visualization tools that I've been playing with, that you drag these shapes in. You have a MIDI keyboard. So it's a bit of me that makes me think it's like Visualizer meets something like Max for Live. I don't know. [00:07:22] S1: Yeah. I mean, there's a visualizer aspect to it, but, like, one one sort of common misconception I run into a lot is, like, that the three d graphics are sort of like this, like, fun little visual on top of, like, some underlying synth engine. But the way I see it is that basically, like... So so the three d graphics are showing you, at least as far as the physics are concerned, like, literally one to one the state of this three d physics simulation. And so you can't... There's not really a way in which you could use it without the three d graphics. Like, they don't have to look pretty, but They they mean they kind [00:07:57] S0: of do. I think maybe I should have said something like Blender, I suppose, is is a better Yeah. So you have to kind [00:08:02] S1: of Yeah. Blender [00:08:04] S0: isomorphic is the word, is it? Like the sort of three d wireframes going into the distance. Is that the right word? [00:08:12] S1: I don't know. [00:08:13] S0: Something like that. Anyway,
00:08:13 · Chris Chinchilla, Evan Mezeske
[00:08:13] S0: Something like that. Anyway, [00:08:17] S1: Yeah. Definitely. I mean, Blender... So one sort of difficulty in building Anukari is that at least in the plugin space, there's like literally no prior art to draw on for a three d editor. Right? Like, that's just not a thing. But obviously in other software, that is a thing. And so Blender obviously was like one of the inspirations in terms of things like, you know, well, what's a typical hotkey for rotating a camera? [00:08:39] S0: Okay. Yeah. [00:08:40] S1: You know, stuff like that. But, yeah, certainly certainly that was an inspiration for some of the aspects of like the three d interface. [00:08:47] S0: And I mean, in some respects, you say not in software, but in the analog musical world. I mean, you talked about guitar strings, you know, you can take... There was actually something at Superbooth one year, which was basically like a live string that you could just sort of pull and pluck. Or you can take things like the prepared piano or just bottles. Three d objects do make noises even if they're not instruments per se. If I look at some of the screenshots here, they look way more complicated, but...