Drishan — audio

Air phrase

Bell plate

Air phrase

Four notes, one breath. The tonguing between them is nothing but a sixty-millisecond dip in blowing pressure.

design · 0:09 · 48 kHzThe jet-bore model played legato: the gate never closes, pitch glides through a smoothed delay-line length, and articulation is a momentary drop below the jet's speaking threshold.how it works →

Bell plate

One metal bar struck three times: center with a soft mallet, off-center, then at the edge with a hard one. Same object, three different chords.

design · 0:21 · 48 kHzNine-mode modal synthesis at free-free bar ratios (1 : 2.76 : 5.40 : ...). Strike position weights modes by their node lines; hardness sets the contact time of a raised-cosine pulse — the real lowpass in a soft mallet.how it works →

Breath tone

A single G that begins as air, finds the pipe, and learns to waver before it lets go.

design · 0:13 · 48 kHzA jet-bore waveguide after Cook's slide flute: breath through a cubic jet nonlinearity into a delay loop closed by an inverting reflection filter. Below speaking pressure the model just exhales; the swell is one parameter crossing a threshold.how it works →

Gamelan run

A descending five-note run on a compressed-ratio bar, a low C left ringing under it, and the run again from farther away.

design · 0:21 · 48 kHzThe modal bar with its ratios raised to the 0.968 power, nudging the inharmonicity toward gong territory, and a damping slope of 1.3 so high modes die like struck bronze. The gong is a second instance of the bank: a ringing resonator cannot be retuned without bending its tail.how it works →

Long wire

Fifty-five hertz and thirteen-second decays: three plucks on a wire long enough that its overtones stop agreeing with each other.

design · 0:26 · 48 kHzThe same Karplus-Strong loop with the dispersion allpasses pushed to 0.3 — group delay falls with frequency, upper partials run sharp, and the string turns faintly piano-like.how it works →

The forgery

A machine listened to the bell plate and made this from what it heard: twelve damped sinusoids, placed by gradient descent, four thousand and ninety-six guesses distilled to one. It is almost the same object. The difference is the mallet.

generation · 0:10 · 48 kHzBatched modal fitting on an RTX 5090: a differentiable bank of damped sinusoids under a multiscale spectral + envelope loss. Four of the recovered modes match the source within two hundredths of a cent; the residual — everything the model could not say — is mostly the strike itself.how it works →

Wire study

A pentatonic line on a simulated string, the pluck point walking from the twelfth fret toward the bridge as the phrase falls.

design · 0:17 · 48 kHzExtended Karplus-Strong: one-period noise burst, pick-position comb, fractional-delay loop with one-zero damping and a 3-allpass dispersion chain. Decay time is a physical parameter: loop gain is solved from t60.how it works →