How this started
I started making music in 2016 and went through a small library of synths. They all worked. None of them combined the blocks the way I would assemble them by hand, and the fractal oscillator I kept wanting didn't exist in any of them. So I started writing my own.
If you want a feel for the kind of music that drives these decisions, my tracks are on YouTube @lostsynapse.
Laura is the result: wavetable, FM, classic analog, and fractal oscillators under one signal path, with a modulation matrix you can wire up without fighting it and an FX rack that doesn't ask for ten plugins to finish a patch. The fractal engines (Mandelbrot, Julia, Burning Ship, Tricorn, Multibrot, Newton) are the unusual part. The complex-plane coordinate is a parameter, so modulating it navigates a parameterized space of harmonic content instead of scrubbing between pre-baked wavetable frames. Park on a coordinate, put an LFO on it, and you get slow timbral drift that keeps shifting the harmonic content as the coordinate moves.
My background
I'm a senior software engineer by day, mostly backend, with about a decade of C++, Ruby on Rails, Python, and Node.js under my belt. The DSP, the plugin host integration, the licensing infrastructure, the website you're reading, the manual, the release pipeline. All of it is built by one person on weekends and evenings. That's the upside of being a studio of one: every decision is consistent, and you're never one acquisition away from the product going stale.
It's also the reason Laura's licensing is offline and the activation never phones home. I don't want to depend on a server staying up, and I don't think you should either.
What's next
Laura is under active development, with a long roadmap of new FX modules, preset packs, and DSP refinements. Every build ships free for the life of your license, no extra charge. If you have a synth feature you've always wanted and never had, write to me. The studio is one person, so your email reaches the person who actually decides what gets built next.