Materia: AudioThing's new re-synthesizer eats your samples and plays them back

AudioThing just dropped Materia, an additive re-synthesizer, and I have been poking at it because it is exactly the kind of thing that turns field recordings and ugly machine noise into something you can actually play.

The idea is simple. Load any sample and Materia analyses it into up to 96 harmonic partials, each with its own frequency, amplitude, phase, and a 128-point envelope. Then you grab the partials and bend them by hand, redraw how each one evolves over time, and play the whole thing polyphonically. You can even start from an empty spectrum and draw partials in from silence, which is a pretty wild way to build a sound from nothing.

For industrial ears, the effects section is the good stuff. There is an algorithmic resonator that models physical materials: pipes, plates, glass, wood, stone, gongs, membranes, springs. Run a factory recording through that and you get metallic timbres you would swear came out of real contact mics. Past that there is a tap echo, a multi-stage phaser, and a waveshaper for when you want to push things into the red, plus a multimode filter with 10 types including two formant filters.

Handy practical detail: the analysed model is stored with the plugin state, so projects and presets reopen without the original sample file. Modulation comes from two envelopes and two LFOs with fully drawable waveforms, there is a preset browser with a randomizer for when you are stuck, and the window is resizable with brightness and contrast controls.

Price is $39 on intro against the regular $69, intro runs until Oct 31. There is a free demo as well, though it drops to silence for 3 seconds every 45 and does not let you save.

AudioThing has been around forever and their stuff always feels solid. This one lands squarely in my wheelhouse. Product page here: https://www.audiothing.net/instruments/materia/