SHLabs builds open-source instruments at the intersection of musical use, scientific computation, and unusual control surfaces. The current catalog is built for VCV Rack 2; VST plugins and Ableton-compatible standalones are in development. Everything ships under the GPL-3.0 license, free to use.
Each family is a coherent design programme. Click through for details, screenshots, install instructions, and source.
A live patch-cable surface for statistics, data science, and the computational social sciences. Sampling distributions, online OLS, exact t-tests, BCa bootstrap, agent-based models. The subject of an accompanying academic paper; built for classrooms from high-school to graduate methods seminars.
Sound-design modules with a deliberate Eastern-bloc analog character, shaped by the West Coast tradition of complex oscillators and function generators. Three modules: Mashina (the namesake), Volna (wave) and Strela (arrow). Built for fun and for getting weird.
Modules that shape sonic environments rather than melodies: Helix, Halo, and Metro185. Slow-evolving, textural, ambient-leaning — tools you patch in once and let breathe.
A growing series of multitap rhythm and gate-combination modules. The idea: take one input clock, tap it through configurable delay arrays and gate-logic combinators, and get back rich rhythmic polyphonies that would take a rack-row's worth of cabling to assemble by hand.
Modules that sit outside the four design programmes — either because they're one-off ideas, or because their family hasn't yet formed around them. Treated as research releases: shipped working, but documented less formally than the family modules above.
Every random module ships with a seedable RNG. Patches save as portable JSON. Same seed, same patch, byte-identical behavior on any operating system.
All modules are GPL-3.0. Read the source, fork it, audit the numerics, build your own variants. No lock-in, no paid tier, no telemetry.
Statistical modules use textbook recipes — Lentz continued fractions, BCa bootstrap, Sanger's rule — verifiable against R and SciPy, not Gaussian approximations dressed up as exact.
The next branch of SHLabs is a small family of DAW-friendly audio tools — VST3 and AU plugins, plus Ableton-compatible standalone instruments — that carry the same design ethos as the VCV catalog: open source, reproducible, honest numerics, deliberate aesthetics. Targeting first release in a future season; sign up via GitHub to follow progress.