There was a time when music software felt joyfully chaotic. Each new plugin looked like a wholly distinct species, programs frequently crashed, applications often arrived with minimal documentation and required days of trial and error before you could coax them into spitting out sound, and some of the coolest stuff could be picked up for nothing on obscure personal websites or labyrinthine forum threads.
Those willing to search for it were rewarded with some of the most powerful, groundbreaking, weird and downright fun pieces of software ever created: tools like Spear, which broke sound down into its base elements and then resynthesized it into a ghostly doppelgänger, or MetaSynth, which allowed you to upload images and use their pixels to manipulate sound waves.
