TAO.Audio

Instruments, performances, and environments.

TAO Audio is a platform for creating expressive digital instruments, performances, and environments that connect sound, visuals, interaction, and space.

Build custom instruments. Perform live across devices. Create works that can be experienced as music, visual systems, interactive installations, or spatial environments.

Built by a musician. Designed for experimentation.

A different approach

Most digital music tools are designed around timelines, tracks, and files.

TAO Audio is designed around performance.

Instruments, gestures, tunings, visual systems, spatial behaviors, and devices become part of the same expressive environment. Works can be performed live, recorded, replayed, transformed, and experienced in new ways over time.

Whether you're building a browser-based instrument, a collaborative performance, a visual system, or a multichannel installation, TAO provides a common foundation for creating and exploring new forms of expression.

Digital instruments

Create instruments that live on phones, tablets, laptops, embedded devices, or dedicated controllers.

TAO supports browser-based interfaces, custom hardware, alternative tunings, expressive control surfaces, and networked performance without requiring traditional DAW workflows.

Digital keytars
Percussion controllers
Touch interfaces
Alternative tuning systems
Browser instruments
Custom embedded devices

Performances

TAO is built for live performance.

Multiple performers can participate from connected devices across a local network, creating shared musical experiences that are responsive, expressive, and immediate.

Performances can combine sound, visuals, interaction, and spatial behaviors within the same system.

Environments

TAO extends beyond instruments.

The same systems used for performance can power interactive environments, installations, visual works, spatial audio experiences, and experimental media projects.

Sound, visuals, interaction, and space become different expressions of the same underlying work.

Recordings

TAO Audio records performances as expressive events and system state — not just audio.

A recorded work can be replayed, reinterpreted, visualized, rendered to audio, or experienced through future renderers, while preserving the intent of the original performance.

Current status

TAO Audio is under active development. The current focus is on:

Digital instruments
Networked performance
Alternative tuning systems
Event-based recording and playback
Audio and visual renderers
Spatial and interactive environments

Public releases will arrive incrementally as the platform continues to evolve.

Explore

Interested in experimental instruments, alternative musical systems, interactive media, spatial audio, visual performance, or expressive environments?

Follow along as TAO Audio continues to grow — recent performances, recordings, and photos live in the Showcase.

For more information, contact: info[at]tao[dot]audio

TAO.Audio — Showcase

Performances and works in progress.

Instruments, performances, and experiments from the TAO Audio platform.

Videos

About TAO Audio.

A digital instrument hardware, firmware, and software platform.

The platform

TAO Audio spans custom hardware instruments, the firmware that gives them expressive control, and the software platform that connects them into performances and environments.

At its core is a system for capturing semantic musical intent — the notes, gestures, tunings, and intentions of a performance rather than just its audio. Captured works support dynamic and variable rendering and re-rendering into many media and formats: audio, visual elements, interactions, and generative artistic forms.

A performance captured once can keep finding new forms.

The maker

TAO Audio is built by RJ Tripp — musician, digital instrument maker, and software developer.

The platform grows out of a practice that treats instrument building, performance, and systems design as one continuous activity: instruments worth playing, performances worth keeping, and a system that lets those performances be re-imagined over time.