Phosphor
A video synthesiser that listens.
A GPU-native GLSL engine with five scene families and a hundred-thousand-particle system, driven by real band envelopes and onset detection, locked to your clock and thrown fullscreen onto the projector. Insert it on a track and the audio passes through untouched.
What it does
Five families of image
Everything renders on the GPU in GLSL. Morphable pattern Fields cover more than twelve forms; Tunnel is a flythrough; Fractals run Julia, Mandelbrot and Burning Ship; Spectrum draws bars, radial and spectrograph views from a true FFT; Ambient holds nebula, aurora, caustics and lava.
A hundred thousand of them
A GPGPU particle system running upward of 100,000 points with trails and reflections, simulated entirely on the graphics card so the count buys you density rather than dropped frames.
It hears more than level
Separate envelopes for overall level and for bass, mid and high, plus onset detectors for kick, snare and hat. Spectral centroid tilts the colour toward the brightness of the sound. One master REACT control sets how hard all of it pushes.
Three ways to stay in time
Lock to Cadence over OSC and follow beat, phase, BPM, transport, band energy, onsets and drop intensity. Or take the host playhead inside a DAW. Or run standalone on Ableton Link. Motion stays on the grid either way.
Built for the room
Fullscreen to a second display or projector, Evolve for hands-free generative drift, Auto for preset roaming and Flow to morph between them — cut, smooth or slow. More than 36 presets and 15 colour palettes, layered dual-engine blending, a video-clip layer with reactive blending, and shockwave ripples on the kick.
Out to the rest of the rig
Syphon output on macOS feeds your VJ software or media server; H.264 recording and PNG snapshots capture the set. MIDI-learn covers every control, and a phone remote joins over the local network by QR code.
VST3 · AU · Standalone. macOS now; a Windows build is in CI with the visuals and reactivity intact — Syphon and recording stay macOS-only.
Engine output
The bundle
Bundle pricing at releaseMade to lock to Cadence
Cadence broadcasts clock phase, beat, BPM, transport, master band energy, kick onsets and a drop-aware intensity signal over OSC. Phosphor listens and answers: motion on the beat, parameters on the bands, flashes on the kick, and the whole image surging into the drop. The bundle includes the full plugin line too — Cell, Schlagzeugs, Contour, Spazio, Glue, Stesso and Tonnetz.
Get it
Phosphor is the SHLabs studio made visible — sound turned into light.
A premium, closed-source SHLabs release in active development. This page is an early look; pricing and availability are announced when it ships. For early access, or questions about a specific host, projector or media server, write to us.