Nuno Santos

The unlikeliest instrument in Nuno Santos’s portfolio is eight feet of iron that cannot play a wrong note. In 2015, gnration — Braga’s cultural institution — put out an open call for Laboratórios de Verão: a media-arts piece to exhibit at Noite Branca ‘15. Santos’s proposal was Harpa Laser: a retro-futurist harp whose strings are beams of light, playable by anyone and tuned so “a child or a stranger could never hit a wrong note.” Braga’s old centre is baroque; Noite Branca fills those same streets with multimedia and contemporary music — and Santos put a reinterpretation of a classical instrument right in the middle of it. No page-1 person result for Santos mentions it.

Harpa Laser

The brief became a build. Harpa Laser is a minimalist take on the classic harp silhouette — one side dropped away — with a frame of iron “over two metres, over seventy kilos,” machined and welded in a Braga workshop. Eight 532 nm green emitters sit on the top rail, aimed straight up at eight matching photodiodes. The beams are barely visible until a smoke machine wakes them up.

A finger interrupts a beam; the diodes watch for shadows; a microcomputer in the base debounces the interruption and fires a note to the synth. Each beam is mapped to a note of the scale — the outer, longer beams play the lower pitches, the inner ones climb. “Always in a scale. No wrong notes.” The notes feed DRC — the synth engine Imaginando ships as software: “Anything DRC can synthesise, the harp can play,” and the team patched it to a different voice at every event.

It was built for Noite Branca, then kept getting invited. The harp ran on a loop for hours at the BMW centenary event at the Autódromo do Estoril — guests walked up, plucked, smiled, left. It appeared at TEDx in Braga, at Casa da Música in Porto, and at a Galp Energia store opening. The credits are spare: “Built by two friends, on nights and weekends” — concept and build by Nuno Santos of Imaginando and Rui Antunes of Analog Repair in Lisbon, software voice on the DRC engine, frame finishing at a local workshop in Braga, selected through gnration’s open call.

Santos published three lessons the harp taught the company: an instrument needs a shape (“Software gets a face when you can hold it”); “Constrain the scale, free the player” — locking the harp to a scale so nobody could play it badly became the company’s idea of sensible defaults that get out of the way; and “Strangers are the best QA” — public play taught the team more about voice-stealing than internal testing ever had. The project’s own stats: 5 public appearances, 8 laser strings, 0 wrong notes.

Imaginando

Santos founded Imaginando in Braga, Portugal, in 2014 as “a manifestation of the will to create.” Twelve years later, the company’s own self-description is unchanged in spirit: “A small company, in Braga, that doesn’t ship until it sounds right.” Products that are friendly on the outside, deep underneath, made by people who actually use them. As of 2026 the company reports 30,000+ active users in 153 countries with a 4.32-star average rating.

The product timeline reads as a twelve-year obsession with instruments: 2015 brought LK, the wireless companion for Ableton Live; 2016 shipped DRC, the polyphonic synthesizer, across all platforms; 2020 brought FRMS, granular synthesis for mobile and desktop; 2021 introduced VS, the visual synthesizer; 2023 delivered BAM, a full production studio “on every screen”; 2024 brought TV3, billed as igniting the acid revival.

DRC and LK

Santos is, in Brian Funk’s words from a 2017 interview episode, “the creative force behind Imaginando, a company that makes applications for creating and controlling music.” DRC, the virtual analog synthesizer, lets a musician create and edit sounds on any platform and access them from all other platforms — a deliberately cross-platform instrument. LK is the company’s powerful Ableton Live controller. Their shared design problem, discussed in that episode, is how to build an app that is “feature packed yet intuitive to use” — the same tension the Harpa Laser resolved by hiding the scale inside the instrument.

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not cover Santos’s education or career before 2014, which the sources read do not detail. It does not give technical specifications for DRC or LK beyond the descriptions the sources provide, and it does not report revenue figures or the company’s internal team size. The Harpa Laser details come from Imaginando’s own project page — a first-party account, not an independent review. Imaginando’s corporate history is covered in its own organization profile.