Kuules suite
Water
a brook is a gurgle; surf is a clock
a brook is a gurgle; surf is a clock
Flowing water is not noise. On a spectrogram it is thousands of brief events — the bubbles that make white water — and what tells you a river is there is their sparse, random flicker. Kuules Water makes water that way: each bubble a note at its size, rising as it surfaces, the near ones you can pick out one by one, the far thousands as the band they fuse into. Under them the turbulence, the gurgle, the spray. Built from the research: the bubble physics, the two size laws of breaking water, the flume studies, the infrasound of waterfalls.
Nine kinds of water, placed. A brook, a river, rapids, a waterfall, surf, a lapping shore, drips, a spout, a drain — up to six on the map, each with its size and its share of one flow. A river beside you is a line, not a point. Surf is a clock. The break rises over two seconds, the backwash hisses nearer over the sand, the foam crackles until the next; the period is the sea's and no two waves are alike.
Each resolved bubble rings at its Minnaert pitch and decays and rises as van den Doel's model says; big ones are low and loud, small ones are the hiss. Drips make a click and, six times in ten, a note.
The scene's discharge, and how far it swings: every water hangs off it by its own law — the roar faster than the gurgle.
Rumble, body, hiss and the bubble band drawn live over frequency for the water you have open, with its bubble population beside them.
A brook at your feet, a river beside the path, rapids, under the falls, a beach, storm surf, a lake shore, a cave, a fountain in a courtyard, a bathroom, a gutter in the rain, drought.
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.
Wide things are wide: a crown of leaves, a bonfire, a brook are many independent sounds across their width, not one blurred one — so a low-Space scene stays out in the world. Under every raised source, the ground's reflection (Ground: none, grass, stone). A few early reflections off what is round you, more and nearer with Scatter. And a cleaner field: dense from the first millisecond, no metallic ring, no rumble piling up when Room is up.