Back in 2021 while we were updating Geosonics we stumbled across a video by Ayako Okamura in which she used filter resonance to “tune” field recordings to precise pitches. It was a nice trick, and seemed a fun way to introduce pitch to non-pitched sound.

At the time this technique found its way into many Geosonics 2 presets. There are even key commands in Geosonics to fix the filter pitch quickly at various octaves.

From that it was a short conceptual jump to creating a bank of filters, and tuning these to a collection of frequencies. This would impose a more complex “formant” onto the ambience. It seemed logical to tune these a bit like a drawbar organ, set at the first few overtones from the fundamental up, and then mix them as you like.

But by choosing different overtone sets, you could create quite different formants, so it wasn’t long before we started editing the frequencies themselves. Eventually the idea of morphing between them came along which resulted in a quite radical, surreal effect. Flowstate as a concept started taking shape.

It’s very simple to drag your own ambience into Flowstate and have the formants “pitch” it, turn it into a pad or a backdrop drone or whatever, but we wanted to demonstrate the full scope of this technique, so have provided a wealth of presets of different types. Even within each Snapshot there are five distinct STATES, which you can switch between.

There’s lots of room to experiment, tune your own world.

Flowstate is available now