Music / Tool
Void Wave is a free, fully-featured browser synthesizer with a hardware-inspired interface. Open it and you're looking at something that wouldn't feel out of place in a rack — physical-style knobs, a backlit panel layout, module sections that mirror the architecture of a real analogue synthesizer. But it runs in a browser tab, with no download and no install required.
The synthesis architecture is properly deep. Two oscillators with selectable waveforms (sine, triangle, sawtooth, square, wavetable) can be detuned against each other for rich, fat unison sounds. The oscillator mix feeds a multimode filter with resonance — lowpass, highpass, and bandpass modes, with the resonance capable of driving into self-oscillation for that classic analogue scream. The filter cutoff is the most expressive control in the instrument: automation-friendly, responsive to velocity, and the first thing anyone reaches for.
Dual envelopes cover amplitude and filter independently, with full ADSR control and adjustable curve shapes. Two LFOs run simultaneously with sync-to-BPM and free-running modes, each assignable to any modulatable parameter. The effects chain — chorus, phaser, delay, and reverb — sits after the main synthesis path and can be configured in series or parallel.
The step sequencer handles pattern-based composition within the instrument: sixteen steps, adjustable length, per-step velocity and gate time, pattern save and recall. Void Wave is fully polyphonic — the voice allocation system handles up to sixteen simultaneous voices with configurable voice stealing when the maximum is exceeded.
An offline version is available as a free download: a packaged HTML file that runs locally from disk without a browser connection. No licence, no activation, no subscription. Just a synthesizer.
Void Wave is the clearest demonstration in this portfolio of what AI-assisted development actually means in practice. The entire synthesizer — its DSP architecture, its user interface, its synthesis engine, its effects chain — was built through an intensive collaborative process with Claude. Not using Claude as an occasional search engine, but as a genuine engineering partner who understood the full system and could reason about it at every level of abstraction.
The Web Audio API node graph that underlies Void Wave was designed by Claude from first principles. The voice management system — how individual note voices are allocated, stolen, and released — is the kind of complex stateful system that benefits enormously from careful architectural design before any code is written. Claude designed the VoicePool class, the note allocation algorithm, and the AudioParam automation system that moves synthesis parameters smoothly without clicks or zipper noise.
The filter implementation required particular care. Web Audio API's BiquadFilterNode provides the filtering, but achieving musically useful resonance behaviour — particularly the self-oscillation characteristic of analogue filters — required a specific configuration and parameter range that Claude researched and implemented across multiple iterations.
The hardware-inspired interface is built from custom HTML/CSS components — knobs that respond to click-drag like real hardware, backlit button groups, module containers with appropriate visual weight. Claude built these components: the knob interaction model (click to grab, drag up/down to adjust, with shift-drag for fine control), the value tooltip system, and the component state management that keeps the UI in sync with the audio engine.
The visual aesthetic — dark panel, phosphor-green accents, subtle material texture suggesting brushed aluminium — was developed in collaboration with Midjourney. Reference images generated from prompts describing hardware synthesizers from different eras gave a clear visual direction that was then translated into CSS.
The polyphonic voice allocation system produced subtle bugs that were difficult to reproduce: occasional stuck notes, voices that failed to release cleanly under certain timing conditions, occasional clicks when voices were stolen at high polyphony. Claude diagnosed each of these from symptom descriptions and stack traces, suggesting specific AudioParam scheduling patterns that resolved the issues without introducing new ones.
A pure web stack — HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with no frameworks. The Web Audio API provides all synthesis and effects processing. Designed to run anywhere a browser exists, with an Electron desktop app available as a free download.
A fully-featured synthesizer that runs in your browser. No sign-up. No cost. Open it, play it, make music.