In 1928, French cellist and inventor Maurice Martenot introduced the Ondes Martenot—an instrument that transformed electricity into expressive human gesture, fusing movement and sound in a way the world had never known. Nearly a century later, Onde carries this legacy forward, preserving its emotional depth while vastly expanding its sonic range through acoustic resonance and ultrasonic sampling.

Onde was created through a collaboration between Bigano, MNTRA Instruments, and performer Daniel Áñez. Vincent Gagnon and Fabien Noel of Bigano—award-winning video game sound designers with decades of experience in interactive audio—infused Onde with their mastery of non-linear, responsive sound design. Built within MNDALA’s interactive architecture, Onde reacts organically to performance, turning every touch into a living dialogue between player and sound.

The instrument was recorded at La Hacienda Creative’s 24-foot-ceiling soundstage deep in the forests of Northern Quebec. The ultra-low noise floor and pristine acoustics enabled every detail to be captured with exceptional clarity. Recording sessions were engineered at 32-bit, 384 kHz ultrasonic resolution using multiple microphone arrays—preserving tone, spatial depth, and harmonic content far beyond the range of human hearing. When performances resonate through metallic gongs and custom amplifiers and are captured at these extreme frequencies, each single performance becomes a full-range polyphonic instrument, revealing textures and dimensions hidden to conventional recording methods.

Onde pushes physical synthesis into unexplored territory, investigating how far acoustic transformation can go when gongs resonate into the ultrasonic spectrum, reaching 60–70 kHz and beyond. Sample Start Modulation (SSM) and non-linear reactivity are embedded in every preset, reshaping how you interact with the instrument and creating a natural, expressive relationship between touch and sound. You are not simply triggering samples—you are playing living sound sources that reach beyond the limits of traditional synthesis.

Onde is not a recreation—it is a transformation. Thanks to SSM, every note accesses a different moment within the recorded performance, dynamically reshaping texture, timbre, and space based on your touch. Vincent and Fabien recorded each performance with full awareness of how it would behave inside MNDALA’s architecture, creating an instrument that breathes and evolves beneath your hands.

Inside Onde is a meticulously curated collection of expressive presets, spanning from fragile whispers to vast cosmic soundscapes. Cinematic drones unfold like landscapes, shimmering and weeping glissandi glide through space, resonant gongs pulse with energy, ethereal chords float in the air, and textured noise blurs the line between acoustic and synthetic. Whether you are scoring film, composing avant-garde music, sculpting ambient worlds, or adding expressive motion to experimental electronic tracks, Onde invites you to explore the frontier between electronic and acoustic, vintage and modern, human and machine.

“Play softly, and it whispers. Push harder, and it sings.”

Installs directly into the MNDALA 2 sampling engine.