MiMU’s First Plugin, The Jellyfish – A Godsend For Soundscapes And Audio-Mangling

British music tech company MiMU (yes, the Imogen Heap-led company known for their magic gloves) is today announcing the launch of its first audio plugin ‘The Jellyfish’, a live-input granular synthesis engine.

The Jellyfish allows musicians to live-record their voice or instruments and then repurpose that audio using the The Jellyfish to create drones, soundscapes and pulses in real-time. The Jellyfish is available on both Mac and Windows platforms, as an Audio Unit, VST3 and as a standalone plugin.

Artists can also drag-and-drop their favourite audio samples onto The Jellyfish and use it as a compositional or production tool. The Jellyfish comes with its own royalty-free audio library, providing access to new samples directly from the plugin itself.

The Jellyfish was originally created by MiMU’s Adam Stark for live-performance granular synthesis with his band Rumour Cubes. Early versions were built in SuperCollider, then Max/MSP, eventually leading to the C++ audio plugin. Prototypes have been used by Imogen Heap, most notably for the live rendition of her song ‘Hide and Seek’ as can be seen in the video below.

Key features of The Jellyfish include:

A beautiful user-interface centering on a shape-shifting jellyfish as the main control-point for the plugin

A ‘grain interval’ control determines when grains are triggered, with long intervals creating separate pulses and short ones leading to overlapping grains that produce smooth drones

A ‘grain position’ control which determines where in the audio to source grains from, with optional buffer position ‘jitter’ (random variation)

Each grain has parameters controlling length, shape, direction (forwards/backwards), panning position and pitch wobble

Grains can be transposed by semitones or microtonally

Playback modes allow automatic movement of the grain position according to modes such as ‘forwards’, ‘backwards’, ‘random walk’, ‘random jump’ or ‘LFO’

Host-clock synchronisation allows The Jellyfish to trigger grains according to the host tempo, in quarter notes, sixteens, etc.

A MIDI-learn feature allows artists to map MIDI notes to markers in the source audio so different parts of the audio can be played back via a MIDI keyboard or other controller.

An in-built preset system allows artists to save their creations as presets for future use

Here you can watch a full tutorial for the plugin.

Pricing and Availability

The Jellyfish is available now from mimugloves.com for a price of £99.