Shoreline

Surf rolls in and draws back, and a glass chime somewhere up the beach turns in the wind. Nothing here is a recording, and nothing repeats: a single Noise module makes the water, decides when each wave arrives, and picks every note the chime plays. It plays itself; press Play and let it run. It all comes back off tape, like a field recording made on a portable deck.

Load it: choose 📚 Examples → Shoreline in the toolbar and press ▶ Play. It needs no keyboard. The patch file is patches/shoreline.json.

Or play it here: press ▶ Play in the corner. The full app is a click away under Open in Soba. The chime runs along the top and the surf along the bottom. The Noise module on the left feeds both, and the two meet on tape at the bottom right.

What it teaches

• Noise as sound. Pink and brown noise through a moving lowpass filter make convincing surf.
• Noise as decision. White noise, sampled on a clock, chooses notes. Noise's smooth Random output decides how fast the waves come, whether the chime rings at all, and how hard it's struck.
• One source, many voices. Every output of the Noise module is patched, and each does a different job. Because one random signal drives both the waves and the chime, the two move together: when the wind picks up, the waves come quicker and the chime starts to ring. When it drops, the chime falls silent.
• A field recording. The surf and the chime meet on a Mixer and go to tape together, which gives the scene a little sway and grain, as if someone had recorded it on the beach.

Modules

How it's built

The surf

[Noise Pink]  ──> [Mix In 1]
[Noise Brown] ──> [Mix In 2]
[Mix Out] ──> [VCA (surf) In]
[VCA (surf) Out] ──> [SVF Filter In]
[SVF Filter LowPass] ──> [Mixer Ch 1]

Pink noise has the even, rushing quality of water. Brown noise, mixed in a little lower, adds the deep rumble underneath. The lowpass filter at 500 Hz takes off the hiss and leaves something that sounds far away.

The waves

[LFO Out] ──> [VCA (surf) CV]
          ──> [SVF Filter Cutoff]

The LFO is a slow, unipolar sine, so it rises from 0 to 1 and falls back about every eight seconds. Each rise is a wave arriving. On the VCA, with CV Amt at 75%, it swells the surf by about 12 dB and never quite silences it. On the filter's Cutoff, which works in octaves, it opens the filter from 500 Hz to 1 kHz. A wave gets brighter as it gets louder, the way a breaker's hiss arrives with its roar.

No two waves alike

[Noise Random] ──> [LFO Rate]

On its own the LFO would be a metronome. Noise's Random output wanders smoothly between -1 and 1, choosing a new value about every fourteen seconds (Rate 0.07 Hz). Patched into the LFO's Rate, each +1 doubles the wave speed and each -1 halves it. Waves now arrive anywhere from every four seconds to every seventeen, in calm stretches and busy ones.

The chime

[Logic AND] ──> [Sample & Hold Trig]
[Noise White] ──> [Sample & Hold In]
[Sample & Hold Out] ──> [Oscillator V/Oct]
[Logic AND] ──> [ADSR Gate]
[Oscillator Out] ──> [VCA (chime) In]
[ADSR Out] ──> [VCA (chime) CV]

This is the classic random melody. On each pulse that reaches it, at most every 0.75 seconds, the Sample & Hold catches the white noise and holds it as a pitch. With Noise Level at 50%, the pitches land anywhere within half an octave of C5. They're unquantized, falling between the keys of a piano, which suits a wind chime: real chimes are seldom tuned to a scale. The sine wave, a 2 ms strike and a 1.2-second ring make it sound like glass.

The wind

[Clock Gate] ──> [Logic A]
[Noise Random] ──> [Logic CV]
[Noise Random] ──> [ADSR Velocity]

A real wind chime doesn't ring on a beat. It rings when the wind blows, and hangs still when it drops. The Clock's pulses pass through a Logic module first. Noise's Random, the wind, goes into its CV, and nothing goes into B, so B is Logic's own Above: high while the wind is above the Threshold of -0.3. AND lets a clock pulse through only then. Through the calms, ten or twenty seconds at a time, the chime hangs silent and only the surf moves.

The same Random also sets how hard each strike lands. With Vel at 80%, a strike while Random is high rings at full level. One just over the threshold rings at about a fifth of that. So a gust doesn't switch the chime on: it fades in with a few faint ticks, swells, and fades out again. The gusts come with the faster waves, because the same wind sets the waves' speed.

Space

[VCA (chime) Out] ──> [Reverb In L]
                  ──> [Reverb In R]
[Reverb Out L] ──> [Mixer Return L]
[Reverb Out R] ──> [Mixer Return R]

A large, six-second reverb spreads the chime across the stereo field and blurs each note into the next. The surf skips the reverb and goes straight to the Mixer's Ch 1, in the middle. That keeps the water close and the chime farther off.

The reverb comes back on the Mixer's Return. Nothing is sent from the Mixer here, so the Return is simply a stereo input. A sound in the middle of the Mixer is 3 dB down on each side, so Master at +3 dB brings the surf back to full level, and Return at 71% (−3 dB) keeps the chime where it was.

On tape

[Mixer Out L/R] ──> [Tape In L/R]
[Tape Out L/R] ──> [Audio Output Left/Right]

The whole scene is recorded onto tape at 15 ips, gently:

• Sat at 35% rounds off the crests of the surf, a breaker's roar squashed slightly, as a small recorder squashes it. That takes about 2 dB off the surf's loudness, which the Audio Output's Vol at 85% wins back. The head bump also adds body to the low rumble.
• Wow at 20% sways the pitch by about ±1.5 cents. On the surf you won't hear it, but each ringing chime note bends a hair, like a chime heard on a recording rather than in the room.
• Age at 20% and Hiss at 8% add a little grain. The hiss mostly hides in the surf and only shows in the calms.

To hear the difference, select the Tape and press Ctrl+B to bypass it. Bypassed, the scene is about 2 dB louder, because the Output is making up what the tape takes. To make it more of a memory than a recording, set Speed to 7½ ips and turn Wow up to 50% and Age to 60%: the chime starts to waver, the surf dulls, and dropouts come and go.

Variations

An old tape. On the Tape, set Speed to 7½ ips, Age to 70%, Hiss to 30%, Wow to 60% and Flut to 40%. It's the same beach, found years later on a tape in a drawer.

Stormier. Raise the LFO's Rate to 0.3 Hz and the filter's Res to 40%. Swap the Level 1 and Level 2 settings on the Mix for a heavier, browner sea.

A wider chime. Turn Noise Level up to 100% and the chime ranges a full octave either way. The surf gets louder too, so lower the surf VCA's Level to match.

Gentler wind. Lower the ADSR's Vel to 40% so calm and gusty strikes differ less.

Stiller or windier. Raise Logic's Thresh to 0 and the chime rings only in the stronger half of the gusts, with long calms between. Lower it to -1 and it rings on nearly every beat, whatever the wind.

Glide. Raise the Sample & Hold's Slew to 50 ms and the chime bends between notes, more like a singing bowl than a bell.

A tuned chime. Patch a Quantizer between the Sample & Hold and the Oscillator, set to Pentatonic Major. The chime now plays notes of a scale, like a set of tuned bells.

A shimmer. Set the Oscillator's Voices to 3 and Detune to 10%. Each strike now beats slowly against itself, like a long metal tube.

Related

• Noise – every output used here, explained
• Sample & Hold – turning noise into notes
• Tape – what each knob does to a mix
• Generative Ambient – variety from cycles that don't line up, and chance kept in key
• Rhythmic Sequence – noise as a hi-hat