The Harmonizer is a living instrument. Eight chords, two palettes, and a field that never arranges them the same way twice.
Harmonious, with no melody, and enough of it sitting near the edge of atonal to keep you listening. Elevating and grounded in the body at once. The sound of hope and of melancholy, often in the same minute.
enter the harmonizer →Runs in your browser. Best with headphones.
Eight chords in two palettes. Cosmos is cool and wide. Womb is warm and close. The same eight positions, voiced two ways. You play by striking chords and shaping the sound with your hand, and there are no menus, only the sound and a few hidden keys.
Four colours sit under your fingers: a cello, a bass horn, thunder, and a run of plucked strings. An angelic layer lifts in over any chord. Freeze holds a moment and lets it shimmer. A microphone fader blends a live source into the sound and into the recording, present above the line, dissolved into the field below it.
the soundThe five notes of a chord compete for space. Each one grows hungry while it is silent, and when the field has space the hungriest takes it, for as long as that space allows. A voice arriving in a crowd gets a short, quiet turn. A voice arriving alone gets a long, full one. Every gesture has a beginning and an end, and none of them stays.
They do not all arrive. A gesture can climb and turn back before it reaches its own top, so the swell never flattens out. This is what keeps the sound from settling into a shape you recognise. Sound that evolves the way leaves move through air, carried by a hand you cannot see.
Everything sits at A=432 Hz. One switch puts it at 440 for anyone playing along with a 440-tuned bowl. A ceiling holds the sounding voices at D4 and below, which leaves the air above 600 Hz free, so a singing bowl can stand on top of the field without fighting it.
the chordsEight positions, two temperaments
The set moves through one family of open harmony. In cosmos the fifth carries each chord and the third sits low in the stack or stays out. The third is the note that makes a chord sound happy or sad, so with it buried the harmony stays wide and the feeling stays yours. In womb that same third moves into the middle of the chord where it glows, with a quiet sub under the root. Cosmos is the sound of distance: air, height, the wide. Womb is the sound of the heart and the body.
I. F (F2 · F3 · A3 · C4 · F4)
The doubled root under an open spread. The lowest ground in the set, a place to arrive rather than to leave from.
II. Am (A2 · E3 · A3 · C4 · E4)
The music sinks and turns inward. The minor third sits sheltered in the middle of the stack, patient rather than sorrowful.
III. Csus2 (C3 · G3 · C4 · D4 · G4)
No third at all. The second stands where it would have been, so the chord shimmers and refuses to say which way it leans.
IV. Dsus2 (D3 · A3 · D4 · E4 · A4)
Fifths stacked wide with the ninth added for colour. It lifts without brightening, the sound of a horizon rather than a light.
V. Em (E3 · B3 · G4 · B4 · E5)
The weight leaves the bottom and the chord opens upward. The one place in the set where B enters, and the whole field tilts with it.
VI. Gsus2 (G3 · D4 · G4 · A4 · D5)
Home, and still unresolved. G is the root of the whole system, and even here the third stays away.
VII. Am7 (A3 · E4 · G4 · C5 · E5)
Four different notes, the densest chord in the set. It carries more colour than the rest and climbs toward the last position.
VIII. C, high (C4 · G4 · C5 · E5 · G5)
The climb settles into a wide, luminous horizon. A single third floats unattached in the upper register, and nothing holds it down.
Anyone who wants to listen, and anyone who wants to play. Press one key and it carries itself for half an hour. Bring a MIDI controller and it becomes an instrument with real depth under your hands. Sound healers, meditators, people who work in deep focus, and people who simply want something beautiful running in the background of a long afternoon.
what it’s forThe Harmonizer was made to listen to and to play, over long stretches. It holds attention without demanding it. Rigorous less-is-more thinking shaped what it does and how it looks. It gives beauty and movement, and it stops short of melody. It brings you down and keeps you awake. For sleep and for inner journeying there is the other Somasonic instrument, the Explorer, made to drift.
make it yoursPlay the Harmonizer as it is. It is a complete instrument, and more is possible. The journey plays the eight chords on a tide built from wave periods that share no common multiple, so the sequence never comes round. Drive takes the sound from still to driven: the gestures gain an edge, they come more often, and more of them stand at once. Calm does the opposite and does it strictly, one sound at a time with a silence about as long as the sound that made it.
It is rooted on a low G, tuned to A=432 Hz to match 432-tuned crystal singing bowls. Play it alongside a G, C, D, and A bowl and it becomes one tuned system. The Harmonizer is MIDI-compatible and speaks MPE, so with a ROLI or a similar controller the key sets the harmony and the height while pressure swells the note, and you play over the journey while it keeps running underneath. Open the microphone and your voice, a flute, or strings join it in the same warm space. With the record function you save your take as a high-quality WAV file, and rewind writes the last minute you just heard.
A living instrument that plays itself once you set it going, and opens all the way down when you want to play it yourself. Go out, play, and share.
how to play →