Model

Virtual ANS

Software synthesizer emulating the Russian ANS photoelectronic synthesizer

Virtual ANS is a software synthesizer developed by Alexander Zolotov (WarmPlace) that recreates the ANS, the photoelectronic synthesizer built in the Soviet Union by engineer Evgeny Murzin and named after the composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin. Like the original instrument, it produces sound from drawn images: the user paints on a vertical spectrogram-style canvas where the horizontal axis is time and the vertical axis is pitch, and the program resynthesizes that picture additively across a large bank of sine-tone oscillators. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, and in a web browser, and is widely used for spectral, drone, and experimental sound design.