Crash1.json, made in soundThing and converted by SoundPatch. Two noise
oscillators fifteen cents apart, a filter opened 11.6 kHz by the
modulation envelope, and the LEVEL shaped by that same envelope rather
than by the amplitude one - which is exactly the freedom the routed level
was for, and not a thing the engine could express a week ago.
It peaks at 10,501 and is gone in about six tenths of a second, inside
the eight tenths the pieces are in the air. The guessed one wandered
between 1600 and 8200 and sounded like a drain.
The patch predates the gate field, so the program's own trigger write is
what makes it a one-shot - which is the argument for having put it there
rather than leaving it to the patch. LowFuel.json is here too, saved from
the newer soundThing with the gate and LFO mode in it, and is not wired
to anything yet.
Both JSONs live beside the tables they produce. The build has never
needed soundThing and still does not, but a sound can now be regenerated,
or simply read, without going to find the editor first.
The bang was guessed at directly in bytes and came out as a low gurgle,
which is what guessing at bytes gets you: a cutoff of 40 looks small and
is 57 Hz, so the filter sweep ended almost shut. Voyager's sound device
is soundThing's voice engine with the editor taken off, so a patch
designed in soundThing - where there is a screen, a keyboard and a pair
of ears - makes the same sound here. What differs is only how it arrives.
SoundPatch converts one into the other. Every parameter the device takes
is a documented function of a natural value and all of them invert: times
are squared into four seconds, cutoff and rate are exponential, depths
and detune are centred on 128. It writes a table of a count and that many
parameter and value pairs, and playPatch hands it to the device - so
every sound after this costs a table and a call rather than forty lines
of its own.
Two things the conversion has to say out loud. soundThing has no field
for the level routing, because there it is always the amplitude envelope,
so the table says so explicitly - a channel keeps its patch between notes
and a leftover from a previous one would otherwise be carried in. And a
field the tool does not recognise STOPS it: a patch format that has moved
on would otherwise produce a table that quietly means something else.
THE BUILD DOES NOT DEPEND ON IT. soundThing lives in its own repository
and is not needed to build anything here; the tables are checked in and
the tool is for when a sound is being changed.
Lander's crash now plays Kick808 as a stand-in until a bang is designed
for it, and the difference is the point: the hand-guessed patch wandered
between 1600 and 8200 for eight tenths of a second, and this decays
3492, 2743, 2037, 1515, 1040, 614, 87, nothing.
The docs check caught the tool count in two manuals, which is what it is
for.
Anachronaut