2025
TimbreSpace
A 3D patcher for making music in mixed reality
Overview
TimbreSpace is a playground of sound for Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest. It takes the patcher model from tools like Pure Data and TouchDesigner into three dimensions: samples become nodes floating in your room, and you grab, connect, and sculpt them with hand tracking.
Operators let you chain samples into evolving musical contraptions, combining real-time audio analysis with physics simulation so the visuals move with the sound. Upload your own sample collections and they're waiting in the headset, searchable by how they sound.
It started as a VR concatenative synthesizer presented at ICAD in 2019, and the shipped version was presented at SIGGRAPH 2025 in the Spatial Storytelling track.
How it's built
- 01
One hand-tracked patching system in Unity serves both the Vision Pro and Quest clients.
- 02
A .NET backend on AWS processes uploaded audio and generates an embedding for every sample.
- 03
Embeddings live in Postgres with pgvector, so samples can be searched by how they sound.
- 04
Each user's collections are preloaded into the headset, so their library is there the moment they start.