The Gap Between MIDI and Audio
In every DAW, MIDI and audio live in separate worlds. MIDI notes are abstract events — pitch, velocity, duration. Audio clips are waveforms. You can pitch-shift audio with time-stretching algorithms, and you can trigger samples with MIDI, but the two are never truly unified. A MIDI note doesn't know about the audio it triggers. The audio doesn't respond to the harmonic context around it.
Arbit closes this gap. Every note in Arbit's piano roll can carry an attached audio file — a vocal take, a guitar recording, a field recording, anything. And that audio participates in the same harmonic linking system as synthesized notes.
How Per-Note Sampling Works
Attach an audio file to any note in the piano roll. The note now stores three things beyond the usual pitch and duration:
- Sample path — the audio file itself
- Sample offset — where in the file playback starts (in seconds)
- Playback rate — speed multiplier for time-stretching
When you play the note, the audio file plays back at the specified offset. Resize the note, and the playback rate adjusts automatically — the sample stretches or compresses to fit the new duration.
So far, this sounds like a sampler. Here's where it gets interesting.
Audio That Follows Harmonic Links
Create a harmonic link on a sample-backed note — shift-click to connect it to another note at a ratio like 3:2 (perfect fifth) or 5:4 (major third). The audio pitch-shifts in real time to match the pure interval.
This is varispeed pitch modulation: the sample's playback rate changes to produce the exact frequency ratio defined by the harmonic link. It's the same principle as speeding up a vinyl record to raise its pitch — simple, artifact-free, and mathematically exact.
The result: recorded audio that tunes itself to just intonation. Attach a vocal recording to a note, link it into a chord, and the voice shifts to a pure major third — not a 12-TET approximation, but the real 5:4 ratio with zero beating against the other voices.
Practical Applications
Retuning Vocal Harmonies
Record a lead vocal. Duplicate the note, shift it up, and link the copy at 5:4 (major third) to the original. The harmony voice is now in pure just intonation relative to the lead — locked in, no beating, the kind of consonance that auto-tune and pitch correction tools can't achieve because they correct to 12-TET.
Building Harmonic Textures From Field Recordings
Attach a bird song, a train horn, a room tone to notes in the piano roll. Link them at harmonic ratios. The environmental sounds become pitched material that moves in pure harmonic relationships — creating textures that fuse naturally because the frequency ratios align.
Sample-Based Composition With Dynamic Tuning
Import drum one-shots, synth stabs, vocal chops. Arrange them in the piano roll as notes. Link them harmonically. Every sample in your arrangement is now part of a unified tuning system — each one's pitch defined by its relationship to the others, not by a fixed grid.
How It's Different From a Sampler
Traditional samplers map samples to MIDI notes. The sample plays at a pitch determined by the note number — fixed to 12-TET. You can pitch-shift manually, but the sample has no awareness of the harmonic context around it.
In Arbit, the sample's pitch is derived from its harmonic links. Change the anchor note's frequency, and the sample's pitch follows. Modulate to a new key, and every sample in the chain rebalances. The audio is a first-class citizen in the dynamic tuning system, not a playback mechanism bolted onto a grid.
You can also scrub the sample start position directly on the piano roll (Ctrl+Alt+drag), edit the offset visually, and consolidate all transformations to a clean WAV file when you're done.
Try It
Arbit is the only piano roll where recorded audio participates in harmonic linking. Attach, link, and hear the difference.