Flosion is the tentative name for sound editing software that I've been working on in one form or another for a handful of years. Briefly put, it's a visual programming language for creating, modifying, and listening to streams of sound. It allows the user to compose various effects by building a network, and to listen to the results in real-time. Every effect is highly configurable, and can be parameterized by nearly anything else in the network.

I began dreaming about this project when I was trying to use existing digital audio workstations like Apple's Logic Pro to create my own synthesizers, effects and melodies and put together songs. I had a great deal of fun with these, but many out-of-the-box synths and effects are complicated and have limited degrees of freedom, which can be overwhelming for a beginner and restrictive for the experienced user who wants to change something fundamental. It also seemed impossible to make one effect depend on properties of another effect, which was something I regularly wanted. Lots of existing music software that I've seen provides the user with a timeline, a list of audio tracks to layer over one another on this timeline, and a chain of effects to be applied to each track. These effects themselves are modular and range from simple, with one or two parameters, to walls of buttons, knobs, and detailed graphics. This works well for creating compositions and using effects that one already likes, but I wanted to be able to lift the hood and re-wire things as I desired.

Thus I slowly began developing my own audio software. The beginnings were very slow and I'll skip the details by saying that I learned intimately how many things you can do wrong in C++. But over time, the more I learned and the more I developed, my software took shape and the first few interesting-sounding glitches were then followed by recognizable melodies and recreations of effects that I was familiar with from elsewhere. There's still a lot I plan to do, but with the foundations already in place, I'm hoping Flosion will eventually be good enough to create freely with and to share with the community.

The end goal is to have software that allows users to play with sounds and create music, working at the level of abstraction they desire, and while having the freedom to configure anything they wish, all while remaining very expressive, intuitive, and unique in its approach.