Kuules suite
Ether
thicker here, brighter there, turning slowly
thicker here, brighter there, turning slowly
A drone is one voice design — something exciting a resonance, with an envelope — times a cloud of them tuned to a series. Kuules Ether is that, with the cloud in space: you paint it onto the sky like a mask. Where the paint is thick the voices gather, fire more often, sit a little louder; where it is thin they are sparse. A second channel paints how bright they are there, a third how high. Then the sky turns.
Nine axes, not nine engines. The series (harmonic, stretched, a tube's odd ones, a bell's, a plate's, random); what excites it (noise, a strike, a bow, a tone); how sharp the resonance is, from breath to glass; the envelope and how often it fires; the pitch's push over it; a wander; how unequal the voices are; the damping; and how many are held rather than retriggered. Planetary winds, a blizzard, a stalactite cave, a soft breath and a bell tower are points in that space, and the same knobs move between them.
A dome from above — overhead at the centre, the horizon two thirds out. A round brush with size and softness; paint, erase, blur; Thickness, Brightness, Height. Start from a shape: a horizon band, overhead, one side, a ring, two clouds, patches.
The voices are dots where they are, coloured by their place in the series, lit by their envelope. Beside the sky, the series as bars by pitch; under the voice, its envelope drawn and draggable.
Low cut and high cut at 24 dB an octave, on every voice before it is placed; drag the edges on the series.
The cloud drifts round you at a rate; its thickness undulates with Life; Settle says whether voices stay where they are or move to the painted places as they retrigger.
A shell from near to far, each voice wide when close and a point when far, the suite's one law of distance and enclosure, the field.
Sixty-four voices at 10OA under ten percent of a core.
A ring round every knob: drag it, and the knob moves — by an LFO, a wandering drift, a follower of the track or of the scene itself, or an envelope. Four movers, a trace of each, and one MOVE knob for all of it. The knob stays where you set it; the ring shows the movement round it.
Spacing gives the scene a spaced pair's width — the low end of the ambience opens up, and every source gets a little more ITD — without moving a single direction (measured: 0.0 degrees at every octave). From 0 (off, the scene untouched) to 150 cm; Character adds the spaced capsules' own comb colour to the ambience only. Drawn from above, capsules and all.
Rig blends a dense sphere of omnis on a rigid ball — the rig you would build with 121 capsules round a baffle, stamped per capsule — into the sharp field: its time structure and shading in every direction and every order, with no comb and no aliasing, and the direction of every source untouched (measured). 0 is off; Ball sets its size (30 cm by default); Sum mixes the two, Morph blends a fraction of the ball's character. Drawn round the head, to scale.
A few early reflections off what is round you — trunks, stones, a wall — more and nearer with Scatter, from their own directions, so a low-Space scene stays out in the world. And a cleaner field: dense from the first millisecond, no metallic ring, no rumble piling up when Room is up.