README from GitHub, MIT

MonkSynth for Schwung

A monophonic formant (FOF) vocal synthesizer for Ableton Move via Schwung — twelve singing characters, each with its own voice and its own face on the 128×64 display.

An homage to the Delay Lama VST plug-in by AudioNerdz (2002), by way of MonkSynth by Jonathan Taylor and its iOS port.

MonkSynth is offered completely free of charge. If you enjoy it, you are kindly requested to make a donation at savetibet.org.

Features

Twelve characters. Jog the Presets page and each one loads its own voice and its own face: Monk, Fish, Unicorn, Little Girl, Old Man, Cow, Dog, Ghost, Officer Eeoo, Punk, Pizza, Cat.
Pad pressure sweeps the vowel. Move has no pitch or mod wheel, so polyphonic aftertouch takes the place of the original's pitch wheel. Four routings — Vowel, Pitch, Both, Both Inv — with an adjustable depth, and pressure modifies the Vowel knob rather than replacing it.
Monophonic with a 16-deep note stack. Overlapping notes retune rather than retrigger, and releasing the top note falls back to the one still held.
Unison up to ten voices, with detune and vocal-tract spread, plus the stereo delay the factory characters were voiced with.
The face is drawn everywhere: as a mouth in the knob grid, as a card that floats while the Vowel knob turns, as a fullscreen portrait with a live vowel readout, and as the character picker page.

External gear on USB-A also gets real pitch bend, channel pressure and CC.

Requirements

Schwung host 1.2.1 or newer. On an older host the module still loads, but the Vowel cell falls back to a plain dial, the card loses its face, and there is no Face page.

Install

Install from Schwung's Module Store, or build it yourself:

./scripts/build.sh          # cross-compiles for ARM64 in Docker
./scripts/install.sh        # scp to move.local (restart shadow_ui for UI changes)

Test

for t in tests/*.sh; do bash "$t"; done

tests/test_smoke.sh builds the module natively, dlopens it and drives it the way the chain host does — the contract, all twelve presets, MIDI, pad pressure, state round-trip, junk input, and the output level across every character.

tests/test_faces_render.sh renders all twelve characters across all four drawing surfaces to a PNG and asserts each one actually drew, that nothing ran off the panel, and that every glyph exists in the device font. To look at the sheet:

node tools/preview_faces.mjs && open faces-out/faces.png

Performance


`create_instance`	~0.8 ms (2.58 MB, ten voices' tables)
`render_block`, mono	4.3 µs/block
`render_block`, unison 9	31.5 µs/block
output level	−21.3 dBFS RMS mean across the twelve, 6.8 dB spread

Measured on an Apple Silicon host against Schwung's ~2370 µs frame budget; scale for the Cortex-A72. Unison 10 is comfortably usable.

Development notes

The DSP is vendored and read-only. src/dsp/{synth,voice,delay}.{c,h} and synth_internal.h come from upstream unmodified. Fix DSP bugs upstream and re-pull with ./scripts/sync_dsp.sh; never patch them here, or the next sync reverts the fix. monksynth_plugin.c is the Schwung adapter and is ours.

src/module.json is generated from the C contract by scripts/gen_module_json.py — don't hand-edit it.

Faces are drawn by one set of functions at four scales, which makes this module a worked example of every module-supplied draw surface Schwung offers:

Surface	Where	What it draws
`drawCell` (Vowel)	knob grid	the character's mouth, cropped tight so the morph reads at 17×15
`card_script`	floats while Vowel turns	the face mouthing the vowel, the anchor name and a travel bar
`type: "canvas"`	fullscreen	a legible portrait and live vowel readout
`drawPage`	character picker	the same portrait, cropped for the 120×45 picker frame

A whole face is illegible in a 17×15 knob cell, which is why the grid shows only the mouth and passes the character through extra_keys. A widget is handed its page's value map and nothing else, so face is pinned to the same page as vowel — with a test.

min_host_version is 1.2.1, meaning "anything after v1.2.0", when the values/nowMs card payload and the other surfaces above landed. Version comparison is numeric per component, so that floor admits 1.3.0 too. The value is read from the catalog entry, not from module.json; it is recorded in both so they cannot drift, and tools/preview_faces.mjs refuses to run against a checkout without those host features.

schwung-monksynth