Lose yourself in the sonic playground of Forester 2022
Have a wander with Leafcutter John through a forest of nodes that generate sound or effect a sound and discover a new virtually living instrument.
Forester 2022
Forester 2022 is an evolution of the original Forester released in 2006. But no one can remember what that looks like so let’s focus on this newly weird and wonderful instrument.
For the most part, you scatter nodes across a sonic landscape and then wander a point through this “forest” of nodes to find intersections between sounds and effects. The sum of the nearby nodes changes depending on where you are which results in a vector-like, morphing movement from generator to generator, thought to thought, idea to idea.
For Generators, you have things such as rhythms, samples, loops, drones, granular scans, spectral and external input. There are all sorts of interesting variations on how rhythms are generated and what’s happening to grains. For Effects, we find looping envelopes, pitch shifting, spectral holds, delays, resonators, distortion and reverb amongst other things.
Sound is triggered depending on how you are moving and interacting with the nodes. It’s all set up via a matrix up on the top right.
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It’s really fascinating to watch as sounds unfurl and appear and recede in the movement of space and changing of sources. It’s the sort of place you could explore forever wondering where to next chunk of beauty is going to come from. Once you’ve stumbled upon something fabulous you can see Forester recording and capture everything you do to disk. You can also record directly back into the buffers so that the sounds become the generators. You can drop in instrument sounds from outside the software; either recording them or set them wandering through the effects nodes.
Forester 2022 is totally engrossing and is available for macOS and Windows for £40 or £20 if you’re unemployed.
- Leafcutter John website.
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3 responses to “Lose yourself in the sonic playground of Forester 2022”
Wow, cool, I remember this from 2006, it was made in Max/MSP back then. Already then it was a great piece of software/art. Seems even cooler now! So glad to see this new version!
@tommy this looks maxmsp also
I remember the original.
Never been a fan because whatever you do sounds like the software itself.