Audio dissection unit

Specimen isn't a sampler that simply plays your sounds back. It breaks them down and dissects them.

Drop in any sample and it is separated into five layers of the same material: Body for the tonal core, Impact for transients and strikes, Residue for air, dust and grain, Negative for a strange inverse, and Veins for buried resonant traces. One sample becomes five editable sounds that can be sliced, mutated and filtered, with a second sample grafted into the first.

Inspired by old backlit microfilm readers, the interface makes it feel as though the sample is sitting under glass.

What you can do with Specimen

Five-layer extraction reveals five different sounds hidden in every sample.
The Lens lets you drag, resize, scroll and zoom to dissect the sound in time.
Microtome slicing chops a sample into up to 32 sections for keyboard playback, cycling or random scatter.
Mutate lab combines Erosion, Fossil crush, Mitosis unison, spectral Stain and reagents that let notes age, detune and die.
Four filter characters cover resonant low-pass, gauze-like comb, vocal band-pass and hollow body-cavity resonance.
Halo and Envelope modes provide three flavours of space and three dynamics modes, including pluck and swell.
Incubate grows a new sound in one click; shift-click gently evolves the current one.
Init gives you a clean route back when an experiment gets out of control.

What makes it different

Most samplers are about playback. Specimen is about dismantling a sound and discovering what is already hiding inside it. The same drum loop or field recording can become a pad, texture, rhythmic chopper or eerie drone depending on how you dissect it.