VOSIS Pro

What it does

A synthesiser that reads a greyscale picture as sound. Brightness is the level, exposure a gain boost, blur a smoother or a noise, downsample a bit crusher, contrast a compressor, and threshold strips visual detail, plus high pass, low pass, tremolo, reverb, ADSR, octave, interval and a major or minor scale. In touch mode a finger scans the image. In add mode regions are drawn onto it, each either holding a sum or scanning vertically, horizontally or both, and each carries a step sequencer. Photos, video and the live camera all work as sources, and it plays five voices.

In the demo

Jade works from black and white album art, holding a finger down as she moves each control so the change is audible, then draws regions and sets them running. She loads a video of her cat, switches to the live camera, MIDI maps a knob and records by screen capture.

Worth knowing

Inter-App Audio is listed but would not connect for her, so it runs standalone. Documentation is thin, she hits stuck notes and crashes, and the free VOSIS drops video import and the LFO. One purchase covers iPhone, iPad and Mac.