Imaginando just dropped COLAPSO, an additive synth that literally plays the periodic table, and I had to hear this thing for myself.
Here is the concept. They took the measured light-emission spectra of 22 chemical elements, 422 spectral lines cross-checked against the NIST Atomic Spectra Database, and transposed them into hearing range. Those spectra become the partials. You are not faking this with wavetables, you are starting from real atomic data. The moment I loaded a preset and saw the element browser, I knew this one was going to be fun.
The knob that sold me is called Observation, and it rides the Gabor limit, the time/frequency uncertainty trade-off. Twist it and you morph between elements mid-note. One held chord can drift from something light and hydrogen-like into something heavy and gnarled, all while the note sustains. For long industrial drones and slow-burn transitions, that is a trick I have never had in one control before.
Under the hood it is a proper additive machine: 3 oscillators per voice with up to 16 partials each, 8 voices, 9 filter circuits, and 4 drawable LFOs plus 4 drawable envelopes. The drawable modulation matters a lot here, because slow evolving textures are where this synth lives. There are 200+ factory presets to get you started.
Honest take: the science is the hook and it got me in the door, but at the end of the day it is still an additive synth, so ears first. The good news is the ears part holds up. The element morphing gives it a character I have not heard anywhere else, and for horror and industrial textures it is genuinely inspiring.
Price: EUR 69 intro until November 1 (regular EUR 89), or rent-to-own at EUR 8.90/month. There is a Synth Bundle with DRC and FRMS for EUR 189. The demo is free with no time limit and no card required, though you get a noise burst every 60 seconds and cannot save, so you can try it before you pay anything. Runs on macOS 13+ (Apple Silicon native) and Windows 10+, in VST, VST3, AU, and standalone formats.
Get it from Imaginando: https://www.imaginando.pt/products/colapso-atomic-synthesizer