Eurorack Touchscreen Physics Simulator

US IOLabs Particles on Kickstarter lets you make music with physics and particles 02/02/24

IOLabs has an ongoing Kickstarter campaign for Particles, which they describe as a Eurorack format touchscreen creative physics simulator. This is what they have to say about it...

Particles is a touchscreen creative physics simulator in Eurorack format. Each particle in the simulation can be given unique values for acceleration, velocity, gravity, mass and starting XY position offering a flexible and powerful range of possibilities. Particles can travel through portals, be removed from the simulation by black holes and collide with the environment and each other to generate gates. The particle's XY position can be mapped to the CV outputs to create waveforms or quantized to create melodies. Collisions may also be switched off for any or all particles allowing them to travel freely around the display without colliding with other sim elements.

Simulations can be drawn from scratch with the touchscreen or setup in fine detail by manually inputting positional values in the UI. Surfaces can be animated to create structures that move the particles around the display in a controlled manner, funneling into choke points for dense collisions or directing the particles along a user-drawn path towards specific quantized voltages.

Internal timed resets or external reset inputs can be used to sync the module or to create repetition and rhythm. Alternatively, no resets can be used for free flowing, ongoing compositions that generate musical events based on collisions and current particle locations. Particles offers a vast range of compositional possibilities and a blank canvas to explore using physics to create music!

Main Features Overview

Add up to 50 particles

Add surfaces, portals, fixed particles & black holes

Animate surfaces

Choose background and simulation colours

Set physics parameters per particle

Each particle can control up to all 12 outputs

Generate gates on collisions

Toggle output states on collisions

Generate CV outputs from particle positions

Quantize CV outputs with up to 8 different quantize note groups per simulation

Preset scales and transposition modes

Micro SD preset storage

Modular presets (load particle groups, sim element groups and quantization zones as separately if desired, loading a full preset is also possible of course)

MIDI support in some form (TBC)