Shadow Trace macOS ·

A machine for making the familiar strange. Shadow Trace takes any sound — your voice, a room, a field recording — slices it into fragments, and gives you six ways to rearrange what’s left.

Record directly or drag in an audio file. The app cuts it into 4 to 32 slices, then lets you shape each one independently: pitch-shift it, time-stretch it, degrade it into granular dust, reverse it, or silence it entirely. Every slice exists in one of four states — clear, liminal, gone, or silent — so you’re sculpting not just order but presence, deciding how much of the original survives.

Six playback modes determine how the pattern unfolds. Stutter locks slices into rhythmic repetition. Scatter triggers them semi-randomly in time, like dropped glass. Dissolve progressively erases the pattern with each loop. Mirror plays the sequence forward then backward as a palindrome. Grow starts with a single slice and reveals more each cycle. Drift lets the whole pattern wander and mutate unpredictably.

The interface is deliberately minimal — near-black, monospace, a single accent color. The audio is the focus. Hit randomize, discover an accident you’d never compose on purpose, export it. The gap between what you put in and what comes out is where the art happens.

Download on the Mac App Store →