Contour — Ambient Morph Synth
Drones, textures, pads, MIDI
Free · In‑App Purchases · Designed for iPad. Not verified for macOS.
Compose your own sheet from 4,845 combinations — steer five axes and hear each one as you land on it. Bake it and the plug-in has it straight away.
Contour is an instrument you play by walking.
Four neural decoders sit at the corners of a square. Your finger somewhere in
the middle is a blend of all four, and the square is drawn as a survey sheet.
The contour lines are not decoration. They come from what those four decoders
actually produce, laid out so that equal distances on screen are equal
perceptual distances in sound. Cross a line and the sound has changed by a
measured amount.
THE SHEETS
Eleven of them, each a different set of four corners, each chosen by measuring
the whole library rather than by ear. They are grouped by what the measurement
found:
BRIGHT — HEHUAN, the brightest, where all four corners hold their own.
CONTRAST — BEIYIDUAN, the widest corner spread at 8.2 times.
BREATH — NENGGAO, the breathiest.
DEPTH — MABO, the deepest at 53 dB.
RANGE — YUSHAN, the widest at 66 semitones; JIAMING, the most focused at 17.
They are named after Taiwan's high mountain traverses.
PLAYING IT
Touch the sheet to sound it. The ribbon underneath sets pitch, or send MIDI and
play it from a keyboard. Press harder and the note opens up — the contact patch
of your finger is the dynamic. Hold on empty ground to drop a mark you can come
back to.
The readout above the ribbon tells you where you are while you are there:
brightness, noise, the grid reference, the frequency.
IN A HOST
Contour is also an AUv3 plug-in. It runs in AUM, GarageBand, Cubasis, Logic for
iPad and anything else that hosts Audio Units, with the position automatable as
two parameters and the sheet recallable with your session. The plug-in draws
the same map the app does, laid out for the window a host gives it.
WHAT IS FREE
Three sheets — BEIYIDUAN, NENGGAO and YUSHAN — with the whole instrument: the
map, the ribbon, MIDI, reverb, marks, and the plug-in. No time limit and no
account.
CONTOUR PRO
A single purchase, once, unlocks:
• All eleven sheets
• Recording, straight to a file
• The envelope panel — attack, decay, sustain, release
• Composing sheets of your own from the library, 4,845 combinations of four
corners, with the map baked for the pitches they share
Requires iOS 16 or later. iPhone and iPad.
The composer plays each set of corners to you, and a sheet you bake reaches the plug-in without reloading it.
• Tapping a mark always sounds. Once four notes were still ringing it went silent instead — and the ribbon moved to that mark anyway, so the mark looked half alive.
• Composing a sheet plays it to you. Stop moving for a moment and you hear the corners you have landed on. Before, you had to hold a note down with one hand and steer with the other, and nothing on screen said so.
• Dragging an axis is smooth. It was running the whole search again for every fraction of a millimetre your finger moved.
• Brushing the axes no longer sends you back to the first combination. If the one you were listening to is still where it was, you stay on it.
• Auditioning no longer leaves a note sounding for ever if the corners change underneath it.
• A sheet you bake in the app shows up in the plug-in while the host is still running. It used to need the plug-in reloaded, and nothing said that either.
• The host's preset list is the sheet list — Logic's Library, AUM's presets. It was empty before.
• The marker on the plug-in's map follows automation. MAP X and MAP Y moved the sound and the marker stayed where the note started: the map saying one thing and your ears another, which is the one thing this instrument must never do.
• Modulation keeps its depth however fast it runs. It used to grow shallower the quicker the LFO went, without you touching anything that says depth.
• A finger on the plug-in's map tells the host it is being held, so the host's automation gets out of the way instead of fighting it.
• The plug-in offers stereo only. A host could set it up with more channels than it has, and the extra ones carried whatever happened to be in the buffer.
Thank you again to the same player, who wrote it down a third time.
The developer, Chih Han Lin, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Chih Han Lin
- Size
- 113.4 MB
- Category
- Music
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 16.0 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 16.0 or later. - iPad
Requires iPadOS 16.0 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 13.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later. - Apple Vision
Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
- English
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- In-App Purchases
Yes
- Contour Pro $6.99
- Copyright
- © Nonotoday LLC
