"Without the workshop, Spectroscore would not have existed!"

What is Spectroscore, and how would you describe it to someone encountering it for the first time?

Spectroscore is a musical notation tool used when performing diffusions on an acousmonium. If you know what that is, you can continue to the next paragraph, but if you’re not familiar with any of those long words above, “performing diffusions on an acousmonium” is kind of like conducting an orchestra, but instead of directing musicians you're using a mixing desk to direct sound through an orchestra of loudspeakers. Each speaker has its own unique character and placement in the room.

Technology wise, Spectroscore is a small web app that takes a sound file and analyzes it. It then displays all of the frequencies as a visual spectrogram. You can draw on this spectrogram, write annotations, and play the sound back while following along with your notes.

However, this can really be used for anything where you need a spectrogram with annotations. I use it a lot to write notes to myself while composing or mixing music. It’s a great way to keep track of your thoughts between recording sessions or sound exports.

You participated in the Acousmonium Workshop during Intonal at IAC on 7 April 2026. How did that workshop influence the development of Spectroscore? Could you describe what that development process looked like?

Without the workshop, Spectroscore would not have existed! During the session at IAC with Alessandro Perini, we got a demo of the software he used, Acousmographe. He had to run it on an old MacBook from 2011 because Acousmographe is discontinued and not supported on any newer hardware.

For the participants of the Open Mixer, this either made the threshold of working with the acousmonium unnecessarily high or forced them to use hacks in another software program called Reaper, with lesser annotation possibilities.

I’m a generalist, with a lot of specialitites. One of the things I do is development, and I really like fixing things, so I decided to fix this issue. 

Acousmographe is basically just a spectrograph layer, with a drawing layer on top: simple building blocks that have existed openly on the internet for ages. So I took a week, threw together a prototype, and shared it with the rest of the class.

One of the first things you see when opening Spectroscore is your email address for feedback. Have you received any since publishing the app?

I’ve got some from the participants of the Open Mixer, and I’ve gotten a lot of good pointers from Alessandro. They have been my only source for this so far, but what a great source! Having a bunch of people stress test your software simultaneously (in a live setting!) is a developer luxury!

Speaking in specifics, the most useful feedback so far has been the really boring stuff. Performance improvements, edge cases, ways in which the workflow can be improved. That's usually the hardest things to test for as a one-man team.

The feedback has also given me some ideas for new features, or more confidence to implement stuff that I left on the cutting room floor during the prototyping stage. I really had to rein myself in and keep the scope creep in check in order to get a working prototype in the hands of people.

However, the most flattering feedback is that so many chose to use Spectroscore during INTONAL, that you want to feature it on your website, and that Alessandro recommended it to other artists. Hopefully more people will find it useful and share their thoughts with me. At the end of the day, this is a project for the community.

How does Spectroscore relate to your broader artistic or research practice? Could you tell us about your personal background?

I'm a multidisciplinary artist, working somewhere in the overlap of music, technology, sound art and the stage. Most of what I do rests on 25+ years of stage experience, and a never ending well of curiosity. I’m also a huge believer in collaboration. In fact, all of my favourite projects lately have been together with others: some months ago I did a live fulldome AV performance at the Dome Dreaming festival, together with Duncan Geere and Simon Rydén, where we combined 360 live visuals with 360 live sound. This fall I’m arranging a series of club nights, named “Ord och Oktaver” together with poet Anna Arvidsdotter, where we will combine the tradition of open mic slam poetry, and improvised music with a house band.

In general, a lot of what I do comes back to community: being part of a scene, but also trying to make things for it. I build instruments and music tools, both physical and digital. Some I keep for myself, and some I put out into the open for whoever might find them useful. Spectroscore fits well into this category of projects.

Continuing on the community aspect, I also try to do a lot for the local scene in general, by being a part of arranging concerts, performances, and general arts shenanigans. None of it feels separate from the art to me. It's what keeps me close to the scene and to the people holding it together.

So far, Spectroscore has only been shared with a selected group of musicians. Based on current insights, what are the next steps for Spectroscore?

Short term steps are to solve some of the blind spots that came up during INTONAL, to make next year’s festival smoother. I’m currently working on a system to better handle multiple scores, and being able to quickly toggle between them, which could be an issue that will require a server with user accounts due to limited browser memory. I really want to stay away from that though, as I want some small corner of the internet to be free from user accounts. I don’t even track any user statistics currently.

On a bigger scale, I know that I want Spectroscore to be developed in close collaboration with other performers. I have a way of doing things, but I also know that it’s far from the only way, or the best way. So, I will probably work on slowly widening the circle of users and get more eyes on it. Spectroscore is still very young, so there are still some kinks that need to be ironed out before I want to think any bigger than this.

With that said, I’m always open to ideas, so feel free to reach out if you’re reading this and have any bigger visions you want to share. (konstantin [dot] aistre [at] gmail [dot] com)

A question that came up while reviewing the platform names: are Spectroscore and SpectraScore related, or are they entirely separate platforms? 

No, there’s no relation, other than that we both chose the most obvious route when it came to naming, haha.

I was going back and forth on calling it “Spectroscore” or “Acouscous”, but I was full from dinner and didn’t want to think about food any longer, so I chose to go the more descriptive route.

Maybe “Acouscous” would have been better in the long run. Maybe finding a new name should be the first item on the list of next steps.

Explore Spectroscore here – spectroscore.studiolye.se

Visit Konstantin (Kotte) Aistre on Instagram – @korvstantin