Review: Anukari by Anukari

Today, we discuss Anukari.

It’s not a desert in Chile. Nor is it the Egyptian god of the dead, a method for disgraced samurai to end it all, or the title of a Tolstoy novel. It could be the jackpot prize on an Italian game show – but it isn’t.

What Anukari (by Anukari) is, according to its website, is a “3D physics synthesizer”. That’s true, but also not nearly enough words to prepare you for Anukari’s interface, its user experience, or its capabilities.

The slightly longer description is that Anukari is a sandbox for designing entire synthesis chains with three-dimensional object models (some real, some idealized) that vibrate, resonate, and interact with each other using real-life (or less real-life, if you prefer) physics calculations.

For a much longer description, keep reading.

Old Toys or Anu Toy?

I’m going to date myself now by admitting to a partially analog childhood, but early on I was a Tinkertoy kid. I’d spend hours fiddling with those little sticks and wooden spools, testing designs and exploring new structures. I had some Legos, too, and later an Erector Set, but those went largely neglected. Something about the spokes and hubs and connections in the Tinkertoy set just resonated with me.

Was I good with the Tinkertoys? Could I replicate skyscrapers and landmarks and famous sculptures with a few sticks and splinters? Oh, hell no. I was useless.

I could just about get a single spoked wheel together, if I hadn’t lost the last spool under the sofa and if the dog hadn’t chewed the ends of the sticks. Past that, most of my Tinkertoy engineering efforts were best described as “ill-conceived”, “toppled”, and “well, maybe he’ll become a writer someday”.

Why do I share these childhood traumas, other than to reveal that I was apparently born in the Elizabethan Age and have no discernable woodjoining skills? Because look at this picture; this is one of Anukari’s factory presets – and an example of what any user could build themselves.

As an utterly pants Tinkertoy-er, that’s an incredibly exciting model. (It’s also a lovely floaty pad that sounds especially nice with lower notes.) Just having access to a tool where I could build something like that myself – that actually produces sounds! – is mind-blowing. And in a virtual space, free of fumbly fingers, lost pieces, and three litres of dog spittle soaking the components, I have a fighting chance to make it happen. So do you, if this sort of thing excites you. Let’s find out how.

The Anukari-B-Cs

Let’s start with basic concepts. Anukari is at heart a physical modeling synth with heavy emphasis on the “physical modeling” bit. As such, this plugin (and standalone app, if you prefer) represents objects and their physical interactions. Anukari’s four Core objects are a Body, Anchor, Spring, and Mic, as displayed in the footer in the screenshot below.

These are the basic building blocks in Anukari. A Body is a “freely moving mass that will vibrate” when disturbed, resulting in sound. To keep Bodies from literally “freely moving” – that is, flying all over the 3D sandbox – they can be attached to one or more Anchors (non-moving, non-vibrating cousins of Bodies). To capture the sound produced by a vibrating body, you place a Mic nearby.

Body-to-Anchor or Body-to-Body connections are made with Springs, which bend, stretch, and compress when plucked, bowed, or struck (among other things). The characteristics of each Spring, including stiffness and resting length, determine exactly how it behaves and how it changes the vibrations and sound of whatever it’s attached to.

All objects in Anukari require specific connections to function. Besides the Spring, the Mic Link is used to connect a Mic to one or more sound-producing Bodies. We’ll see other connectors below; Anukari also includes a generic “Connect” object that will transform into the proper sort of connection once Anukari sees what items you’re connecting. Anukari’s pretty savvy that way.

As the model above (also from the Factory presets) shows, designs don’t have to be grand and outlandish. The central-to-right part of this model is simply one Body stabilized between two Anchors, with a Mic attached to the Body via a Mic Link. (We’ll talk about the other bits below.) The result is a nice analog-style bass with polyphony. Not bad for a few virtual sticks and spokes, eh?

Elements in Anukari models are added by dragging them from the footer to the main window. Connections like Springs work similarly; drag it first to one object and Anukari will highlight the existing objects you can drag toward to connect. Objects of all sorts can have multiple connections, so if you can dream up a configuration, you can very probably model it. You can even drag a Body out of place with the mouse, letting it go to snap back and make sounds manually. That’s fine for testing, but there are better and easier ways to perturb Anukari models.

Keep Calm and Kari On

In fact, there are five objects meant to coax noise from models; Anukari calls these Exciters. Three of them — the Mallet, Bow, and Plectrum Exciters — model physical objects, while Oscillators and Audio Input (from elsewhere in the model or external sources) are a bit more abstract.

In the model above, two Oscillators (at left, looking like jet turbines) get the job done. In the preset below (from the “Generators” section), a Mallet is configured to periodically and simultaneously strike the three central Bodies, while two Mics pick up sounds from multiple Bodies each.

How does one configure an Anukari Mallet to strike on its own? With one of the available Modulators, naturally. In this case, an LFO, highlighted just to the right of the Mallet. Because it’s selected, we see the available LFO parameters in the configuration panel at far right, revealing this as a sine wave with a rate of two bars (tempo synced to the DAW), which is how often it auto-triggers the Mallet to make some noise.

Like other Anukari objects, Modulators must be explicitly attached to targets, here by use of Modulator Links. Besides the LFO, Modulators include Macros (with controls at the bottom of the right-hand panel), Velocity, Note and Env(elope) Followers, MIDI CC, and more. In the image above, you can see several Envelope Generators (resembling gears) in the upper half, along with the three configured Macros (box with a single large button) influencing the Mallet (“RepeatRate”), Mics (“Isotropy”), and a “master” Envelope Generator (“Dip”).

In terms of building blocks, that just leaves Anukari’s stable of effects. Anukari includes all manner of onboard effects, with Reverb, Delay and Grain Delay, Distortion, Compressor, Flanger, Chorus, and more. In the preset below (a dramatic stab from the “FX” section), the 3-Band EQ at the very bottom is placed between a Reverb and a Mic, with its adjustable parameters shown on the right.

Synth Wars Episode IV: Anu Hope

That’s a lot more words, and if they haven’t fully conveyed everything that Anukari can do, perhaps the descriptions (and the pretty pictures) have at least inspired some ideas about what you could do with Anukari yourself. If not, here are a few more tidbits to nibble:

Anukari ships with both synth and effect plugins, which is both tremendously useful and expands its potential applications significantly. Anukari also allows reskinning of the environment (as in the screenshots above) and the objects themselves (as in the screenshot below), with several options for each. You can also use two post-process shaders to generate wild and psychedelic visual effects that follow the sound produced. When active, the effects persist in “Cinematic Mode”, which displays just the 3D environment and can be quite handy for live performances.

Additional conveniences include MPE controller support, pre-mapped hotkeys, camera-related function buttons at left (though users with three-button mice will have most necessary functions close at hand), model management (like stop motion and reset to resting state) and 3D visual preferences buttons at right. Each object’s parameter set includes Orientation and Position sliders, in case manual dragging of icons becomes an issue.

I’ve shown off a few of Anukari’s Factory presets, but it’s worth browsing them all and studying any that pique an interest. All objects, connections, parameters, modulations, and effects are available to copy or to experiment with. It feels a bit like tinkering with a fully modular software synth like Native Instruments’ Reaktor, but because the models mostly represent physical objects, it also feels more intuitive and grounded, somehow.

This is the point in the review where I’d usually talk about how a plugin sounds, what it feels like to use, and who might be interested in it. Instead, I’ll do three things. First, I’ll point out the obvious: Anukari is probably not a plugin you’d reach for if you’re on a tight deadline. (Unless you’ve already found or created the perfect model for what you need, in which case, sure you would.)

Second, I’ll report that Anukari’s performance, at least for me, has been quite good. I know (from his excellent and fascinating dev logs) that developer Evan Mezeske has gone to great lengths to make Anukari usable – and feasible – on various hardware and OS configurations. I can’t speak for all, but on my “reasonably beefy five years ago” all-purpose PC, Anukari runs smoothly, stably, and with snappy response.

Finally, and particularly for anyone a bit daunted by Anukari’s workflow and more complex models, I’ll say this: Anukari was built by an ex-Google engineer and, apparently, a bit of a gearhead who knows his way around really physical models like automotive engines. Of course he knows how it works and how to build crazy nine-level models and multi-mic’ed mega-modulated menageries of little blocks and spheres.

I, on the other hand, am a reformed Tinkertoy failure with the innate mechanical skills of a large sack of flour. I’d have to do some serious human cloning research just to answer the question of how many “me”s it would take to change a light bulb. What could I, armed only with what I’ve relayed above and a quick jaunt through the (excellent and informative) Anukari user manual, possibly create with this plugin in a couple of hours?

Well, for one, this sci-fi backwater space station-looking thing:

Is it beautiful? Perhaps not. Is it the first thing I attempted to make? No, I ran through several unholy experiments that we should never speak of again. But does my model make a unique and intriguing sound – namely, a raspy ominous semi-pulsing sort of drone – that I’m now able to shape and tweak to taste? You bet it does.

And it didn’t fall over or roll under the couch, either. If I can do this with Anukari in an afternoon, the sky’s the limit for anyone. Little Tinkertoying me would be so proud.

Purchase Anukari from our partners at ADSR Sounds.

Learn more about Anukari from the Anukari website.