Spectune

Paint sound, then play it

Coming to the App Store

Spectune is a music app for iPhone and iPad. Instead of notes on a staff or blocks in a piano roll, you paint. Pitch runs up the canvas, nine octaves of it, and time runs across. Wherever there is paint, there is sound, and the brighter the paint, the louder it plays. Press play and Spectune turns the painting back into music.

A song is built from short sections, four, eight or sixteen bars each, that you paint on their own and then arrange into something longer.

Screenshots

A song called Night Bus on iPad: sections and tracks in the sidebar, coral strokes on a pitch grid, and the brush panel open with Soft selected — Brushes, each with only its own settings.

The same song in dark mode, the paint glowing against a near-black canvas — The same song after dark.

The canvas in 3D: a verse and chorus as a landscape whose height is loudness — 3D, where loudness becomes height.

What it does

Brushes — Soft, Pluck, Swell, Fade, Tremolo, Vibrato, Chord and Spray, plus Line for glides and an eraser. Drums too: Kick, Snare, Hat and Click. Effects you paint over what’s there: Blur, Smudge, Texture, Warp, Echo, Shimmer and more.
Instruments and voices — strings, voice, brass, woodwind and keys. Each track is played Pure, Air or Glass: clean tones, breathy noise, or a detuned shimmer.
Paint from a sound — import a recording, or hum into the microphone, and Spectune paints its loudest pitches onto a track, ready to edit with the brushes.
Arrange and mix — drag sections into a song of up to 128 bars. Linked copies change together. Each track has volume, pan, reverb and echo, with mute and solo.
Snap to a key — set the tempo, key and scale, and strokes land on the notes of the scale instead of every semitone.
Export — the song as M4A or WAV, a stem per track, the project file, or a video of the painting playing, in landscape or portrait.

Made for the device you have

On iPhone, the canvas fills the screen and the controls float above it. On iPad there is a sidebar of sections and tracks, and Apple Pencil pressure sets how loud a stroke plays. Songs are ordinary files, kept in the Files app, and can sync through iCloud Drive if you turn it on.

$4.99, all of it

Spectune costs $4.99 once. Every feature is included. There is no subscription, no Pro tier and nothing to buy inside the app.

Nothing behind it

No account, no analytics, no ads, no tracking. Spectune has no networking code of its own. The microphone is used only while you record a sound to paint, and what it hears is turned into paint on the device, never saved as audio and never sent anywhere.

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