Fugue Machine is a tool inspired by composition techniques used in Baroque music and Serialism — e.g. Bach’s canons and fugues, and Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique. The idea was to design a tool to manipulate a melody’s speed, direction, and pitch, as well as play multiple variations of the melody simultaneously.

As it turned out, the best implementation for this was to reimagine one of the most fundamental building blocks of all music sequencers: the piano roll.

Fugue Machine is the world’s first multi-playhead piano roll. Create a music sequence and play it back with up to four playheads at once — each at various speeds, directions, and pitches. Watch the playheads dance, and hear the complex patterns that emerge. It’s mesmerizing.

Fugue Machine is compatible with iPad, iPhone, MIDI, AUv3 MIDI, Ableton Link, AudioBus, and Inter-App Audio. And thanks to the AUv3 standard, you can now run multiple instances of Fugue Machine simultaneously when hosted in an AUv3 MIDI host app, like AUM (shown above).