INSTRA HUE

Lightness Spectral Synth
tap to record · 10s
high
low
time →
turn sideways for the full sweep
E2

Take a picture to hear it. Each column is read left to right and sung back as a stack of sine waves.

Speed
Decay
Sens
Focus
Voices
Balance
Cutoff
Zoom
Lines
Space
Kick

instra hue

Lightness Spectral Synth

Point the camera and shoot. instra hue reads the photo left to right and plays it spectrally — but here the pitch follows the light itself: the lighter a colour, the higher its note; the darker, the lower. Each column rings the tones of whatever brightnesses live inside it, all snapped to a musical scale, so a bright sky sings high while shadow hums low. Flip the switch to Vid to record a 10-second clip instead — it loops while the playhead sweeps it live, so the chord moves as the picture does. Tap to invert the mapping — let the dark ring high and the light low. Press the picture and slide: drag up–down to push the contrast, spreading the notes wider apart; left–right shifts the saturation. The Sens dial sharpens or softens which brightnesses sound. The note slider on the right transposes every note up or down together — drag it up for a higher root, down for a lower one, up to two octaves either way (centre = E2). The Focus dial tilts the spectrum toward the lows or the highs. Voices sets how many tones sound at once, dropping the chord down to a single note, and Balance weights which survive toward the bass or the highs. The Cutoff dial silences the highest notes first, sweeping down the scale like a low-pass on the note triggers — turn it down to cut deeper, up to open the top back. The Zoom dial magnifies the picture around its centre — the picture itself stays static. Tap to wash the picture in darkness — pulling every note downward. The Lines dial rules vertical bars across the frame for rhythm, Space slides them closer or further apart, and the Kick dial snaps them to a classic kick-drum groove (cycle through six). Tap crop then drag a box to play just part of the frame, then drag inside the box to slide the selection or drag outside to sculpt the contrast. Pick a scale, set it to loop or one shot.