It listens
Play anything — a beat, a riff, a hum — and a neuron locks onto it, snapping to musical ratios. No tempo setting, no click. Because it responds to the raw waveform sample-by-sample, there is no beat-tracking lag: it answers instantly.
Glia lets you improvise complex electronic music on stage — responding instantly to everyone in the room
Free forever. No account. No internet required.
Electronic gigs force a choice: press play on pre-arranged material, or wrestle a fragile rig live. Tempo-sync tools share a metronome — never the give-and-take of an acoustic ensemble. So one performer becomes the clock master and the rest lock to their grid.
Ableton Link shares tempo but no musical intelligence. MIDI clock is rigid master/slave. Running multiple Max instances crashes. None of them let your modular, guitar and laptop have a real conversation.
No training data, no beat-tracking, no quantise. Just biology running at audio rate — every sample, 44,100+ times a second. That is why it reacts the instant you play.
Play anything — a beat, a riff, a hum — and a neuron locks onto it, snapping to musical ratios. No tempo setting, no click. Because it responds to the raw waveform sample-by-sample, there is no beat-tracking lag: it answers instantly.
Push the tempo and it pushes back. The cell tires as it fires and recovers in the rests — so it drags, breathes and swings like a real player instead of a grid.
Three brain chemicals shape every phrase: glutamate excites, GABA carves the silences between beats, and glycine sharpens the timing — the biological equivalent of a razor-tight quantise.
The lights aren’t reacting to the sound — they are the sound, driven by the same neural activity. Audio and lighting are inherently in sync, with no beat detection in between.
This is a real Hodgkin-Huxley neuron running in your browser. Feed it a pulse, drag the tempo, give it a nudge — watch it lock on and answer.
In a Glia session every performer feeds the same neural field. It entrains to all of you at once, finding the relationships between what each person plays — a shared brain rather than a shared clock.
The demo above lets you feel that give-and-take solo. Open a session and send the link to play together — phone-as-second-player join is coming soon.
Glia runs as a VST3 / AU plugin and takes any audio or MIDI in — so it drops straight into the rig you already gig with.
Eurorack, a laptop, a pedalboard, a phone — any combination, in the same musical conversation.
Nothing is pre-composed. The performance emerges from the physics of the network, so it is genuinely new every night. And because the stage lighting is driven by the same neural activity, the room moves with the music — not a beat-detector’s guess at it.
Peer-to-peer sync, neural entrainment, local-network discovery and the core engines — free, forever. No account. No internet required. Download it and play a gig tonight.
£0
The full live-performance platform. Forever.
£8/mo
Honour-system support — advanced engines, priority relay, a vote on the roadmap. Nobody is ever locked out for not paying.