Footsteps

Footsteps are in nearly every scene of every film and game, and the ear catches a repeated sample at once. Footsteps makes every step from the walk itself — the heel, the roll, the ball, the shoe, the floor — so none is ever the same.

Synthesised, not sampled: every step made from the walk, the shoe and the floor, placed in the field at up to 10th order — no two alike, and the floor creaks where its boards are loose.

Kuules Footsteps is built from how walking actually sounds. A step is a heel strike, a roll and a ball contact, and a real stride is never a metronome: its rhythm wanders the way a person's does, long-range and fractal, never random. The shoe sets how sharply the foot meets the floor; the floor answers with what it is — a wooden floor's boards, stone's thump and grit, gravel's hundreds of tiny collisions, grass, snow, dry leaves, a metal grate, carpet.

A floor that is a place. On wood the boards are laid out in the world, each with its own tuning and looseness, so the same board creaks the same way every time it is stepped on — and now and then settles by itself after. Up to four walkers on the map, each on its floor (yours, or the room upstairs, heard through the ceiling), on a path you draw or wandering round its place. Or first person: the listener is the walker.