Longwave

Longwave is a generative ambient radio. Instead of looping recordings, it synthesizes a continuous, slowly evolving soundscape live on the device, note by note, so it never plays the same way twice. Dial in a mood, set it down, and let it fill the room. Its defining preset, Next Room, is music heard muffled through a wall, the way a concert sounds from down the hall as you drift off to sleep.

Six presets anchor the sound space, and 15 macros shape texture versus melody, distance, room size, echo, and natural environment. The Drift preset works as a director, moving slowly through ambient and melodic regions over the course of a night. Narrative episodes pair long-form spoken-word stories with matching ambient beds, which makes Longwave a medium and not just a sound machine. It grew out of two earlier lab experiments, the Ambient Generator and Interactive Frank 2.

Underneath is a custom C++ DSP engine built from scratch. It combines algorithmic composition with subtractive, FM, and Karplus-Strong voices, multi-tap Schroeder reverb, and a real-time-safe mixing path at 48 kHz, with no sample libraries. One core compiles natively for iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Fire TV, and to WebAssembly for a live demo in the browser. Longwave is on the App Store for iPhone and iPad, with Apple TV and Fire TV in beta.