Aural Relics of Operating System's Past - Anarchy FX

Anarchy FX


This is the newest software I'll be talking about in this series. Coming out around 2000 Leighton Hargreaves designed this plugin pack for Windows that had many unique ideas packed inside of it. To say this is an understatement, together they make up probably the most unique plugin pack ever created.


The Corkscrew filter was a multiband pitchshifter that utilizes the Shepard tone (or Risset tone) technique to create an infinitely rising/falling audio illusion effect. The harmonic adder put glowing, crystalline upper order harmonics to the sound, but not in an apex aural exciter sort of way. It would add rich synthesizer textures to whatever sound you were running through it, spectrally built off of that source material. The spectral Convolve was an interesting spin on the bit crushing effect: tnstead of using bit depths and sampling rates, it would spectrally detect the 'noise' and the 'tones' in the sound and let you fade between both extremes. Where both extremes sounded like totally different flavors of very degraded low quality mp3s. I never could get 'length separator' to do anything too compelling, but the concept description here sounds pretty fascinating if one could get it set right:
"Bisects the input signal according to the lengths of its component frequencies. Short sounds become the 'transient' part, long sounds become the 'stable' part. These parts can be isolated (ie the other part removed), or assigned different pan positions to create stereo movement."




Bonus: from my email correspondence with Leighton Hargreaves:

Reflecting on sound: “As I've become older and wiser, I've had to re-evaluate the idea that "there must be sounds that could exist, which no one has ever heard, waiting for someone to invent a way to make them" - now I think this is a tad naive. Reductively speaking, the vast majority of possible sounds will never be heard by anyone. If you pick 12 notes at random from an 88-key piano, the number of possible combinations is greater than the number of stars in the universe (and amazingly, after a vst plugin has output five frames of audio - just over a tenth of a millisecond - there have been the potential for more unique output possibilities than the number of stars in the universe).....



......But most of these combinations wouldn't be musically meaningful, which is why it's hard to write an original melody. So the objective must be to invent a good sound, not just a new sound! This takes us deep into the subjective realm of human cognition - it's a mistake to even think of 'sound' we perceive (as opposed to the measurable physical vibrations) as a distinct input channel, or as separate from our other senses or our internal mental state, as beautifully shown with in McGurk effect. “



regarding his plugin work: “a few months ago my AnarchySoundSoftware web server crashed, I lost my online shop setup, and all my old plugins disappeared off the web. Until yesterday that is. Inspired by your email, and a few other recent emails from AnarchySoundSoftware users, I've quickly thrown up a new site, over which I'm publishing everything.” All of his plugins are now free of charge on his website including many new curious goodies like 'Geosynth'


I hope that this was an interesting look back at a plugin that has been all but lost to the shifting sands of new technology, and I hope that you check out Mr. Hargreaves’ site.

Next time: Hyperprism Stand-alone