Darkness

Darkness is a mood plugin, and it's built that way on purpose: a few big knobs and one picture of what they do. Most of this suite is about being truthful and measurable. This one is about a feeling.

A filter dulls a signal. Darkness dims a place. Brightness leaves every direction at once, so nothing shifts and nothing narrows — the scene keeps its shape and its placement while the light goes out of it. A filtered field sounds like a field with a filter on it. A darkened field sounds like the same field through a veil.

The dimming can be staggered across the orders, and this is where it stops being an effect. The smeared, diffuse part of the field and the sharply placed part lose their light at different rates. Pull them apart and the room stops behaving quite normally — somewhere between underwater and a dream, and the further you push it the less the ear can explain what it's hearing.

Or only where the wall is. Aim the darkness at a region and only what comes from there dims: a voice through a wall, a room behind a door. The rest of the field stays in the light.