Wormhole: Sample & Beat Maker

Sample anything from your camera roll or mic. Wormhole auto-detects key & tempo, chops the sound, and turns any clip into full beats in seconds.

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Inspiration

I’ve been producing music for over 15 years and spent 8 years performing as a DJ. My creative home has always been Ableton Live, hardware samplers, and deep sound design sessions in the studio.

Over the years, I noticed a frustrating disconnect: inspiration strikes everywhere, but the DAW is chained to the desk.

Whenever I was on the go, recorded a cool environmental noise, a voice memo, or found a snippet in a video, the friction to turn it into actual music was painful:

  1. AirDrop the audio to the Mac
  2. Open Ableton and load Simpler
  3. Pitch-shift, warp, find the root key manually
  4. Chop transients and align everything to the project BPM

Mobile music apps on iOS tried to solve this, but most fall into two extremes: either toy-like beatpads without real depth, or clunky desktop DAW ports with tiny menus and endless settings trees.

I built Wormhole to eliminate all friction between capturing a raw sound and jamming on a finished, key-locked instrument in 3 seconds.

What it does

Wormhole is an instant sampler, scale-locked granular engine, and pocket groovebox for iOS.

  • Instant Sound-to-Beat Ingestion: Drop in any video from your camera roll, a voice memo, or record live from the microphone.
  • Zero-Input Music Theory: You never type in a BPM or guess a root note. Wormhole analyzes the audio, extracts the tempo (BPM), detects musical pitch and key, and cuts transients into 32 grid-aligned playable slices.
  • Scale-Locked Piano Roll & 808s: Every note you draw or tap is mathematically locked to the detected scale: $$d \equiv (f_{\text{fundamental}} \cdot 2^{k/12}) \pmod{12}$$ You physically cannot hit a wrong note. If you modulate the key mid-track, all melody lines transpose harmonically in real-time.
  • The Wormhole Bus (Granular Resynthesis): A dedicated live performance XY-bus that pulls audio grains into an ethereal portal. You can freeze single grains into lush ambient pads, smear vocals into harmonic choirs, or stutter snares into live fills.
  • 1-Tap Reactive Video Export: When your loop is done, Wormhole renders a 1080×1920 vertical video with audio-reactive visualizers ready for TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts.

How we built it

Wormhole was engineered with native Apple technologies, prioritizing ultra-low audio latency and butter-smooth 120 FPS rendering:

  • Audio Engine & DSP: Built with AVAudioEngine, Accelerate Framework (vDSP / FFT) for instant transient slicing and root-pitch detection, and custom granular synthesis buffers.
  • UI & Interaction: 100% native SwiftUI designed around zero-hierarchy ergonomics. Everything lives on a single, responsive view with gesture-driven pitch-bending and tape-style scrubbing.
  • Subscription & Monetization: Powered by RevenueCat (purchases-ios). Free users get the full core synth, sampler, and audio export. Wormhole Pro unlocks unlimited tracks, the physical STRINGS modeling synth, uncompressed 24-bit WAV export, and iCloud multi-device sync.
  • Web & Landing Page: Built with Astro, TypeScript, and modern CSS deployed on Vercel with sub-50ms TTFB worldwide.
// Example: Real-time Scale Snapping & Harmonic Locking
let detectedKey: MusicalKey = audioAnalyzer.detectRootKey(from: sampleBuffer)
let lockedPitch = scaleQuantizer.quantize(frequency: inputFrequency, to: detectedKey.scale)


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## Challenges we ran into

1. **Real-time Pitch & Key Detection on Transient-heavy Clips:** Real-world audio (especially noisy voice memos or phone recordings) doesn't have clean sine fundamentals. Tuning FFT windows and autocorrelation algorithms to reliably detect root keys without CPU spikes took weeks of DSP refinement.
2. **Sub-millisecond Audio-to-Visual Synchronization:** Keeping the custom canvas visualizers locked to dynamic tempo fluctuations without introducing jitter required tight synchronization between the audio render thread and CoreAnimation/Metal display links.
3. **Eliminating the "Menu Paradigm":** As an Ableton user, the hardest design challenge was subtraction: removing menus, knobs, and setup dialogs while retaining professional-grade sound design depth.

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## Accomplishments that we're proud of

* **True Instant Flow:** You can record yourself clapping or humming, and within 3 seconds have a full, tuned 808-and-drum groove playing.
* **Offline First & Privacy Respecting:** 100% of audio processing, slicing, and video rendering happens on-device. Zero accounts, zero tracking, zero cloud dependencies.
* **Seamless RevenueCat Integration:** Clean, transparent freemium model where the core joy of making music is never gated, but power features naturally convert to Pro.

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## What we learned

Building for mobile requires a radically different mindset than desktop music production. On a phone, **speed to gratification is everything**. If a producer has to think about routing or settings, the creative spark is gone. Designing algorithms that make smart musical decisions under the hood (auto-gain staging, LUFS mastering, scale-snapping) empowers creators to stay in flow.

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## What's next for Wormhole

* **AUv3 Plugin Export:** Load Wormhole directly inside Logic Pro for iPad, AUM, and Cubasis.
* **MIDI Out & Hardware Bluetooth Sync:** Control external hardware synths directly from the Wormhole step sequencer.
* **Community Sample Portals:** Peer-to-peer drop for exchanging chopped sample packs and granular presets.

Built With

  • accelerate
  • astro
  • audio-processing
  • avaudioengine
  • coreaudio
  • dsp
  • ios
  • music
  • revenuecat
  • storekit
  • swift
  • swiftui
  • typescript
  • vdsp
  • vercel
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