//FE Chladni — Cymatic Plate Resonator
Free — Available Now
Scatter sand on a metal plate, draw a bow down its edge, and the sand runs away from everything that moves and piles up on the lines that don't. Those are Chladni figures. FE Chladni sends your audio through a real vibrating plate and shows you the figure it makes — a resonator you tune by building the plate, not by turning an effect up.
It's an effect, not an instrument. Put it on a channel that is already making sound — drums, a guitar, a synth, a whole mix — and the plate rings along with it. It does not play notes of its own, so sending it MIDI and pressing a key will not produce anything. (It accepts MIDI so you can assign a hardware controller to its knobs.)
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Build The Plate
Four materials — steel, aluminium, brass and glass — each with its own ring, and each the colour of the metal it is. Three shapes: a disc, a square, and a stretchable rectangle, each with a distinct set of tones. Size and Thickness set the pitch the way they would on the real object: a smaller or thicker plate rings higher.
Play It Anywhere
Drag the drive point anywhere on the plate, or automate it. Moving it changes which of the plate's tones can sound at all — a very different result from filtering the ones that already do. Sync to DAW locks its path to your project's tempo, from eight bars a lap down to a sixteenth-note triplet.
Contact & Damping
Contact sets how finely your signal touches the plate, from a needle point to a soft, broad fingertip — bright and complete at one end, a dark heavy thud at the other. Damping takes the plate from a short percussive body to a ring lasting tens of seconds. Stereo width comes from two listening points on the plate itself.
You Can See What You're Hearing
The plate draws its own still lines as it sounds, and the sand heaps up along them into ridges you can watch form. Change the material, move the drive point, pull Contact wider — the figure reorganises itself in front of you, and it stays on the plate however long you leave it running.
It isn't decoration bolted onto a reverb. It is the same plate you are listening to, which means the picture tells you what the sound is about to do.
Fourteen Presets, And A Dice
From a bell and a gong to a snare body and a dark slab, plus one for each way of moving the exciter. Each is a plate you could have built yourself, so they are as much a starting point as a sound. The dice builds a whole new plate in one click — it picks a character first and then builds a plate around it, so every roll is something you can actually hear, pitched somewhere you can use it.
MIDI Learn & Six Looks
Right-click any knob, move something on your controller, and the two are linked. Mappings save with your project and keep working with the plugin's window closed. Six interface looks to choose from, including a light one for a bright room, and your choice is remembered across projects.
DAW & Format Compatibility
FE Chladni runs as a 64-bit native plugin in all major Digital Audio Workstations on Windows, and as a standalone app if you don't want a DAW at all.
(Logic & Pro Tools coming soon)
Coming Soon: CLAP, AU, AAX
macOS and Linux coming soon
Go And Ring Something
FE Chladni is free. Make an account, claim it, and it is in your library with the installer and your licence — the same as anything else we make.
Get It FreeRead the release notes →