by rumcake

CymaticPlate

Name: CymaticPlate
Brand: rumcake
Price: 25 GBP
Availability: InStock

A macOS audio plugin built on a real simulated plate.
Watch the sand find the nodes.

One-time purchase. License key delivered instantly by email.
No subscription.

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The product

A real plate, not a metaphor.

CymaticPlate simulates a clamped Kirchhoff plate with explicit finite-difference time-domain integration. Audio excites the plate. The plate rings. Sand finds the nodal lines. You hear physics, not a synth pretending to be one.

Read the science behind CymaticPlate

01

Plate physics

13-point biharmonic stencil, validated against published clamped plate eigenvalues. Not a modal synth.

02

Cymatic visualiser

Live sand particles drift to the nodal lines as the plate rings. The figure forms in front of you.

03

Sound

Stiffness, damping, mallet width, where the strike lands: every variable bends the tone. Nudge them until the metal sings, then sculpt it with the filter and delay. Sonic beauty, tweaked to taste.

04

It plays other synths

Switch on MIDI Out and the ringing plate fires a sparse, scale-quantised stream of notes from its own resonance. Strike once and it sequences an evolving line you can route into any synth on the next track.

Hear it

Three waveforms. Plate, sine, saw.

Strike the physical plate for inharmonic, gong-like tones, or switch to the sine and saw engines and play it as a synth, with every control remapped to fit. Each preset below is one engine in a different mood. Click a card to hear the wiring.

CymaticPlate in Logic Pro: Plate engine, Classic palette, sand tracing nodal lines in blue

CymaticPlate in Logic Pro: Saw engine, Ember palette, a symmetric cymatic figure in amber

Want to try it on your own material? Download and install the plugin, it runs as a fully functional free trial, with a short noise wash over the output every 30 seconds until you activate it with a license key.

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