The History of HISE
The development of HISE started in 2014 as an experimental framework with the goal to create a virtual clarinet to combine wavetable synthesis with sample playback. Realizing the lack of available tools for this kind of project, the priority shifted from creating a single virtual instrument towards assembling a reusable collection of building blocks to let other developers realize their ideas without having to start from scratch or even learn C++.
Following the licensing concept of the underlying JUCE framework, the decision to publish HISE as an open source toolkit helped setting it apart from its proprietary competitors and HISE continues to be the major open source option in a field that has been dominated for years by a single company.
While the virtual clarinet that sparked the creation of HISE never saw the light of day, the 1.0 version of the framework was published in 2017. Since then, the industry adoption of HISE has slowly but steadily risen and HISE is now the foundation of products that generated more than 5 million USD revenue.
Meet the HISE Team
Christoph Hart, born in
1985 and currently living in Berlin,
Germany, is a composer and the main developer of HISE.
Initially, he began working on HISE
during breaks between theatre productions. However, over time, his focus has shifted, and he now
creates music for theatre productions during breaks from working on HISE.
In addition to the work
on the HISE codebase he is collaborating with different companies to build audio plugins.
Dominik Mayer, born 1986,
and also living in Berlin,
is an artist, musician and wingman developer of HISE.
In the beginning he started supporting HISE
with UX/UI feedback and maintenance work, and along the way has grown into his role as a full-stack
front to backend dev.
When he is not busy fixing server issues, he is helping out in several plugin collaborations and is
providing generalist assistance to the HISE cause.