Most synths that call themselves additive still start from idealized sine stacks or an FFT snapshot of a sample. Imaginando's new Colapso starts somewhere stranger: the actual light given off by atoms.
What's actually generating the sound?
Each of Colapso's three oscillators per voice can hold up to two of 22 chemical elements, and the partials aren't picked by ear, they're pulled from 422 measured spectral lines in NIST's Atomic Spectra Database, the same reference physicists use to identify elements by their emission lines. Pick hydrogen and you get its real line spacing as harmonic content; pick a heavier element and the lines bunch into dense, inharmonic clusters that behave nothing like a standard wavetable. Up to 16 partials load per oscillator, across up to 8 voices, with a Mix control to morph between the two elements loaded into a single oscillator.
Why does the sound keep moving while the note holds?
This is the part that separates Colapso from a gimmick preset pack: each partial decays at the real transition probability of the atomic state it came from, so held notes don't sit still, they evolve the way an actual excited atom relaxes. Imaginando pairs that with Observation and Planck sliders built around the Gabor limit, the same uncertainty-principle tradeoff that says a sound can't be both short in time and narrow in frequency. Push one way and tones go pure and steady; push the other and the same patch collapses into grain and noise.
Expect, in Imaginando's own framing, tones that drift subtly over time, wide evolving pads and bell-like keys that can tip into inharmonic, metallic, occasionally bizarre textures.
What else is in the box, and what does it cost?
Once the spectral content is generated, the rest of Colapso behaves like a serious modern synth: nine modeled filter circuits (ladder, state-variable, Sallen-Key, diode, comb, formant among them), four drawable LFOs and four drawable envelopes, four macros, polyphonic aftertouch, two insert effects plus a send effect and bus compressor, and a drag-and-drop mod matrix. It ships with 200+ factory presets and runs as VST/VST3, AU and standalone (with Ableton Link) on Windows and macOS, with iOS and Android versions planned. Imaginando, a six-person studio founded in Braga in 2014 by Nuno Santos and best known for the DRC and FRMS synths, is selling Colapso at an intro price of 69 EUR/USD (regular 89) through November 1, 2026, with a free demo, a 14-day refund window and an 8.90 EUR/month rent-to-own option.
