About

Instruments that write.

Tunary Instruments makes small instruments that write music with you, using music theory and DSP. Four of them so far. Each one has a single strong idea and no filler.

Where it started

Tunary was started by a New Zealander who used to play music for a living, and then stopped.

What stayed was the part nobody pays you for: sitting with an instrument until it suggests something you would not have thought of on your own. A good instrument does that. It has opinions. It pushes back. You end up somewhere you did not plan.

Most software does the opposite. It waits. It gives you a blank grid and a thousand parameters and asks you to supply every idea yourself, which is fine on the days you have ideas.

So the instruments here write. ARGISH composes an evolving piece from a chord wheel and a mood. SILT runs short loops through a tape machine until they come out as different music. REHEAT writes basslines and hands you the MIDI to play with your own bass. THALM puts a sound in a real room down the hall.

You still make the decisions. The instrument just refuses to sit there quietly.

No AI in the sound

There are no trained models here and no generated audio. The composition is real music theory, written out as code, and the sound is real DSP.

It is a design choice, not a marketing one. A model that has heard a million basslines gives you the average of a million basslines. A rule that knows what a passing note is gives you something with a reason behind it, and it will tell you the reason if you look at the MIDI.

It also means nothing you make with these is trained on anybody else's work.

What we will not do

The plugins do not watch youNo telemetry, no usage tracking, no analytics. A paid plugin makes exactly one network connection, once, to check your licence. Free ones never connect at all.

The website does not track youNo cookies. No advertising network, no social pixel, no third-party analytics. Nothing is stored on your device to follow you between visits.

Your music is yoursRelease it, sell it, sync it to picture. We take no cut and want no credit.

How we sell

Play it before you pay. Every instrument runs free in your browser. No download, no signup. Decide with your ears, which is the only part of you qualified to decide.

Buy it once. Perpetual licence. Thirty days to change your mind, no reason needed.

And it keeps working. Our licence says that if the activation service we rely on ever disappears, we will find a way for people who already paid to carry on using what they bought. It is written into the agreement, not just promised here. Software you paid for should not stop working because a third party we chose went away.