SGD

Spatial Gesture Designer · VST3 / AU / Standalone macOS / Windows

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Edit view — the whole instrument on one screen: gestures on the left, the room floor in the middle, the curve editor below it, and the keyboard they all play from along the bottom. Drawing a path, shaping its curves, sizing the room, then out to the observe view.

SGD turns a sound file into a gesture: a sound together with its motion through a virtual room around the listener. You draw the path on the room floor, lift it into three dimensions with an elevation curve, bend the timing with a motion curve, and bind the result to a MIDI key. Pressing that key does not merely play the sound, it sends it traveling — around you, overhead, past your ear.

SGD does not pan. It binauralizes every gesture against a physical model of the room, so on headphones the sound leaves your head, with distance, air, wall reflections and Doppler all following from the space you built. The whole spatial computation runs offline in the background, so playback itself costs almost nothing — and every gesture still keeps its own mixer strip with gain, three-band EQ and a send to the shared room reverb.

SGD is developed by a former employee of ZKM Karlsruhe and Dear Reality (acquired by Sennheiser), who has worked in spatial audio for over a decade.

The gesture list: each row shows a key dropdown, the gesture name, its sound file and length, and a thumbnail of its path.

A sound, a path, a key

That is a gesture, and the list keeps all three together: the sound file it plays, a thumbnail of the path it flies, and the key it answers to. Pick a new key from the dropdown and the binding moves with it — up to 128 gestures in a room, each with its own color.

The keyboard strip: colored dots on C4, D4, E4 and the black keys mark the gestures bound to each key.

Play space like an instrument

Every gesture lives on a MIDI key, marked by its own color on the keyboard. Spatial sound design stops being an automation-lane chore and becomes something you perform live, from your DAW or the standalone application.

The trajectory editor: a looping path drawn around the listener with the sample's waveform painted along it.

Draw the motion, sculpt the time

The waveform is painted along the trajectory, so you see which part of the sample happens where. The motion curve then lets the source rush, hesitate, freeze mid-air, or run the path backwards.

The elevation editor: breakpoints above and below the listener's ear line define the height of the path.

Lift it off the floor, stretch it wide

One editor, three curves. Elevation lifts the path over your head or drops it to your feet; the width curve spreads the two channels of a stereo file apart like wingtips, opening from a point into a wide wash and closing again.

The render panel: Direct plus first, second and third order reflections, a Doppler amount knob, and a background render progress bar.

Sound that leaves your head

True binaural rendering, with distance, air absorption and up to three orders of wall reflections. Dial the reflections deeper for dense, vivid spaces, and set the Doppler shift of moving sources to taste.

The room settings dialog: a wireframe room with the listener at its center, size in meters, and wall material controls.

Rooms are real, and they are yours

Width, height and depth in meters, with a wall material of your choice — absorption, damping, scatter and RT60. Resize the room or swap concrete for carpet and the reflections, the reverb and every gesture adapt automatically. Rooms save as self-contained folders, samples included.

The per-gesture mix strip: gain, low, mid and high EQ knobs, and a send to the shared room reverb.

Every gesture keeps its own strip

Gain, three-band EQ and a send to the shared room reverb, per gesture. Nothing is ever rendered twice: reopen a room and it is instantly ready; tweak a curve and only that one gesture quietly re-renders while you keep working.

The trim dialog: a stereo waveform with a highlighted region and fade handles at each edge.

Only the part that flies

Drag over the waveform to keep the part of the sound you want, pull the triangles for fades, and slide the whole region along the file. The gesture and its painted trajectory redraw around whatever you keep.

The SGD observe view: the room as a wireframe box seen from outside, with four named gestures tracing colored paths around the listener. — Observe view — the room from outside at true scale, the listener at its center, every sounding gesture named and tracing its path in its own color, each with a glowing sphere that swells and fades with the loudness of the sound.

Demos

Five screen recordings, each with the binaural output of SGD itself as its soundtrack. Step through them with the arrows — nothing plays until you press play, and only one plays at a time.

Put headphones on first

These clips are binaural: the whole point is that each ear hears its own signal. Over speakers both signals reach both ears, the cues cancel, and the sound just comes from wherever your monitors are — there is nothing left to demonstrate. On headphones the same file puts the source out in the room, behind you, above you, passing your ear.

One sound, one point, moved around the room between takes — front, behind, to either side, overhead, close and far. Nothing is panned: each position is binauralized against the room, so the source stays outside your head and the direction is heard rather than inferred from a level difference.

The same sound set in motion along a handful of plain paths — straight across from left to right, out and back, around a square, down a zigzag — and then the motion curve bent so the source rushes through one stretch of the path and lingers over the next.

A stereo file is placed as two sources rather than one, and the width envelope under the room says where each channel sits at every moment. The same marching band is played five ways: the pair stepped apart, left and right exchanged, the stage opened gradually from a point to its full width, the pair pushed apart by distance, and spread front to back around you.

The sample's waveform is painted along the trajectory, so every event in the file has a visible place on the path. Line a transient up with a corner and the hit lands exactly there — the sound and the space it moves through are edited as one thing, by eye.

A handful of sketches of what the thing is actually for: a siren crossing the room, footsteps circling behind you, a whisper arriving at one ear, dogs somewhere off in the dark, a marching band passing by. Each one is a sound, a path and a key.

Download

Download for macOS Apple Silicon · VST3 / AU / Standalone Download for Windows 64-bit · VST3 / Standalone

14-day free trial · every feature unlocked · no registration

User manual →

Specs

Platform: macOS 11 (Big Sur) or later, Apple Silicon (ARM) only Windows 10 or later, 64-bit
Formats: VST3, AU, Standalone AU is macOS only AAX (Pro Tools) coming in v2.0
Sample rates: 44.1, 48 and 96 kHz only
Tested hosts: Logic Pro, Cubase, REAPER

The macOS build needs macOS 11 (Big Sur) or above and runs on Apple Silicon (ARM) only — there is no Intel build, and it will not run on Intel Macs, including under Rosetta. Sessions must run at 44.1, 48 or 96 kHz; other sample rates are not supported. The Windows build needs Windows 10 or later (64-bit) and comes as VST3 and Standalone.

Trial & license

SGD starts with a free 14-day trial. The trial is the complete plugin: every feature is unlocked for the whole period, with no watermark, no export limit and nothing held back. Starting it takes one click — no name, no email address, no registration.

When the 14 days are over, SGD keeps running and your rooms keep opening, but the plugin is muted — it produces no audio output until a valid license key is entered. Enter one at any time, before or after the trial ends, and the sound comes straight back. One key covers every machine you own — see how licensing works.