MOD·07 / Spectral

AURORA

Spectral panning: every frequency goes to a different place in the field. Your sound, unfurled across the stereo like an aurora — real width, mono-compatible.

Free · AGPLv3 VST3 · AU macOS
AURORA plugin interface
// What it does

Your sound, unfurled across the field.

AURORA gives each frequency band its own azimuth — lows centred, highs fanning to the sides, or any curve you draw. It turns mono into ultra-wide stereo where the spectrum is physically unfurled across the field, like an aurora spreading its colours. No Haas, no delay tricks: real spectral re-placement by per-bin phase de-correlation — crystalline width that actually survives mono.

Spread

How far the bands separate — scales the angle assigned to each bin. 0 = mono; 100 = maximum unfurl.

Tilt / Map

The frequency→position curve of the fan. Centre = lows-centre / highs-edges; negative leans the width into the lows and reins the air back toward the centre. The character of the fan.

Motion / Sync

The spectral fan opens and closes by modulating the map. With SYNC it locks to tempo — the unfurl pulses with the track (capped under ~20 Hz, no audible AM).

Mono Safe

AURORA's own net: ties the lows to the centre below a cut (50→400 Hz). The ILD is useless under ~1 kHz, so the bottom never widens itself apart.

Duck

The fan closes when the dry hits and reopens in the gaps — the width breathes with the performance instead of sitting static.

Mix · In Phase

Dry/wet by power law (the dry is delay-aligned to the block). IN PHASE folds the wide image to mono-safe in one click.

// The physics

Spectral panning by phase de-correlation.

The most PRO tool of the catalog: real width without the tricks that break mono — STFT re-placement with per-bin phase de-correlation, not a Haas delay.

STFT / overlap-add

Hann at 75% overlap with COLA — analysis/synthesis per block. No full phase vocoder (it never stretches time), which keeps the risk low.

Per-bin panning

Each bin gets an azimuth θ from the curve: its magnitude is split L/R by constant power and its phase is de-correlated per bin (opposite in L/R) — that's what opens the width, with no comb-filtering.

Anti-AM limit

The mapping angle must vary slower than ~20 Hz or audible AM appears — Motion and the fast SYNC divisions are clamped under that bound. Honest by design.

Lows-centre net

Below the Mono Safe cut, bins collapse toward the centre — guaranteed mono sum, because real low-end width comes from de-correlation, not level.

Dry sidechain (Duck)

An envelope-follower on the dry scales the global angle toward zero on transients — multiplicative on the angle, never touching phase or the power split.

Honest latency

Block latency (one STFT frame, N = 2048 samples) reported to the host and PDC-compensated — the trade-off for real spectral unfurling vs a zero-latency widener.

Formats: VST3 · AU Systems: macOS Build: Universal (Apple Silicon + Intel) Latency: ~2048-sample STFT block (PDC-compensated) License: AGPLv3 · open-source

AURORA is free. And open.

The whole catalog is free and open-source. AURORA drops with the first transmission — get on the signal and you'll be first to know.

Public release at the first drop · AGPLv3 on GitHub