A sound’s face

Every sound has a face: a small green shape beside its name, drawn from what the sound actually played. This page is about what a face shows, how to read one, and where you’ll see it.

What a face shows

A face is the sound’s spectrum, stood upright and compared with the rest of your bank.

• Height is pitch. The base is the lows (about 35 Hz), the top the highs (about 14 kHz).
• Width is “more than the bank”. At each height the face is wide where this sound has more there than the sounds in your bank have on average, and narrow where it has less. A sound exactly like the bank’s average is a straight column half as wide as its space.
• The outline is the whole phrase, the standard phrase every sound is played on (a held note, a high stab, a two-note chord, a low note and its tail).
• The faint layers inside are the phrase over time, cut into twelve slices, each as large and as bright as that slice is loud. A slice that is almost silent (a long tail’s end) draws no layer.

The face is drawn from the engine’s own render of the sound, the same render the model measures, so it is a picture of what you’d hear, not a guess.

Reading one

• Wide at the top: brighter than your bank; narrow at the top: darker.
• Wide at the base: more low end than your bank.
• A thin stem below: nothing under the sound’s lowest note. Most pitched sounds have one.
• Wide all the way up: more in every band than the bank’s sounds, which is what noise looks like.
• Layers spread wider than the outline at one height: that part of the phrase carries more there than the phrase does overall.

Two sounds with similar faces have similar spectra. That is not the same as sounding alike: how a sound moves and how its pitch behaves are mostly not in the face.

Where faces appear

• The menu bar, beside the name of the sound you’re playing, at every level: the face of what the keys play. A sound you open flies into it, or into PERFORM’s well, from its row or card, and it shows the new face as that one lands.
• The bank, on every row, in a column left of the row’s two lines. A preset’s face comes with the app, so a preset row never waits for a render of its own.
• EVOLVE, beside each card’s name.
• PATCH, at OUT past the amp (a click on it plays the sound), on A and B in TEACH at the well's foot, in a module's sheet on a touch screen, and beside the model’s guess for the next module: the patch as it is, and the patch with that module, from the render the guess made of it.
• PERFORM, beside the sound in your hands, and beside B once an offer has grown. B grows out of the face, and goes back into it. In stage mode (⇧F) the face fills the screen.
• AUDIO IN, in the square on the module in the rack: the face of your input as it plays, drawn from the last few hundredths of a second, before the patch. It is there only while the input carries a signal. See playing through Auracle.
• The warm start, on each of the nine cards.
• TASTE: each sound on the map is its face, sized by how unsure the model is about it.

A face sits in space its place always keeps, so a name never moves when the face arrives. Where a name could be cut short (the bank, A and B in PATCH's TEACH), the column is wider by the face; EVOLVE’s and PERFORM’s names wrap rather than cut.

An empty space means one of three things:

• The face is on its way. A sound from an earlier session is rendered for it once the bank has finished arriving, after anything else the engine has to do (at the start, that includes PERFORM’s measurement of the sound it opens with). One render serves every place that shows the same sound: its row in the bank and the sound you’re playing. Every preset’s face comes with the app, rendered ahead of time from the preset itself, so a preset doesn’t wait for one.
• The sound doesn’t play. An edit the instrument refuses to play has no render, so it has no face.
• There is nothing to compare with yet. A face is drawn against your bank, and needs at least four sounds there with faces.

When a face changes

A face changes only when something real does:

• its render changes. The header’s face is the sound as it stands, so an edit shows in it once the edit’s render lands. Turning a PERFORM control doesn’t change it: nothing is rendered until you keep or take.
• your bank changes. A face is drawn against the bank, so when sounds are added, replaced or cut, every face is drawn against the bank as it is now. A change too small to move a face by a pixel’s worth isn’t redrawn.

Faces are redrawn in place. Nothing in a face moves on its own.

While you play it

The face of a sound you’re playing answers what you hear. Over the face, what sounds now is drawn in the face’s own bands against the same bank: its outline lights up as loud as the sound is, and the outline of what you hear this moment is drawn over it and fades like phosphor. When the sound stops, it fades and is gone, and the face is as it was.

It happens wherever the face of what you’re playing is, at that face’s own size: PERFORM’s well, the face at OUT in PATCH, the face flying between the levels, the EVOLVE card whose PLAY you pressed, the sound’s mark on TASTE’s map and its ring on LEARNING’s, and the whole screen in stage mode. A small face, like a mark on the map, only brightens its outline.

Each face answers its own sound and nothing else. With an offer in B, PERFORM’s two faces each answer what you hear of their own sound: at BLEND’s home only yours, holding B only B’s, and both between. An EVOLVE card answers its own PLAY, not the other card’s.

With reduced motion set on your system, nothing is drawn over a face: it stays still while you play.

Share a sound as a card

1. Open the sound.
2. Choose Download as a picture… in ⌘K.
3. Set the first box to the sound’s card.
4. Press DOWNLOAD.

The card is the sound’s face, its name, and the line its bank row has: the seed it grew from and what changed, or where it came from (a hand-made preset). At 2× it is 1200 × 630, the size a link preview wants. Like every picture Auracle downloads, the card carries the patch: drop it on Auracle and the sound opens. While the sound’s face is on its way the dialog says so and waits. A sound with no face to draw downloads as a card without one, and the dialog says why: this edit doesn't play, so it has no face, or a face needs at least four sounds to compare with.

The reference has the measurement in full: the bands, the slices, and how a face is compared with the bank.