Atoms

Sample rate determines digital audio bandwidth: the system can represent frequencies up to half the sample rate

Sampling continues a centuries-old tradition of cultural collage rather than being modern theft

Sampling repurposes recorded sound as an instrument, extending the hip-hop tradition of making music without conventional instruments

Sampling+ is a retired CC license that Freesound cannot unilaterally remove from existing sounds

Sampling+ works like CC-BY-NC but additionally forbids using the sound in commercial advertising

Saturation contrast — pure vs. diluted color — can be achieved by mixing with white, black, gray, or the complementary

Saving incremental versions frees generative artists to experiment boldly without fear

Sawtooth, square, and triangle waves have distinct harmonic series that determine their timbral character

SC uses four enclosure types with distinct purposes: parentheses, brackets, braces, and quotes

Scale degrees are faster than interval names for most practical tonal-music tasks

Schranz is hard, fast, abrasive German techno named onomatopoeically, associated with Chris Liebing since the late 1990s

Screen blend mode lightens by inverting, multiplying, and inverting again — giving black transparency and white full brightening

Secondary notation — whitespace, naming, colour — carries meaning for human programmers that the interpreter discards

Self-playing musical automata have a history of over a millennium, predating computers as models of algorithmic composition

Sequenced electronic music by Raymond Scott and Delia Derbyshire is cited as a technical precursor to techno's machine-rhythm approach

Session musicians whose performances are sampled often receive no royalties because they were paid as hired performers, not composers

Set recording levels slightly low rather than high because digital clipping is irrecoverable

setcpm() sets global tempo in cycles per minute; the default 30 cpm equals 2-second cycles

Setting a synth to monophonic mode is required for portamento/glide between note pitches

setup() runs once and draw() runs every frame, forming the animation loop

Several Tidal functions like rot, whenmod, and layer throw undefined in installed Strudel 1.2.6

Shadertoy uniform names (`iTime`, `iResolution`, etc.) are undefined in glslViewer and must be replaced

Short daily ear-training sessions outperform infrequent long sessions because the brain consolidates pitch memory between practice bouts

Shut Up and Dance sped up hip-hop breakbeats to house tempo, creating the foundation for jungle and UK garage

Sidechain keying drives a compressor's level detection from a different signal than the one being compressed

Singing pitches during ear training accelerates recognition by adding motor output to the perceptual loop

Sinogrime incorporates East Asian motifs — traditional instruments and kung-fu film samples — into grime production

Son clave is a two-bar framework pattern built from asymmetric 3-2 or 2-3 hit groupings

Sonic Pi cannot feed the rig's 4-bin FFT bridge for audio-reactive visuals — it runs in its own IDE with a bundled SuperCollider server

Sonic Pi idiomatically uses symbols not strings for samples and notes — play :e3 or play 52 work but play "e3" does not

Sonic Pi is designed for school children to learn programming through live coding music, with pedagogical materials built in from the start

Sonic Pi synth opts (amp:, pan:) control per-note volume and stereo position

Sonic Pi synth, sample, and fx names must exist in the bundled set; names like :kick, :bass, :verb are errors — the real names are :bd_haus, :tb303, :reverb

Sonic Pi's (range 0, 8) excludes the end value (0..7) while (line 0, 8, steps: 9) includes it — a common off-by-one source

Sonic Pi's random functions are deterministic: the same run always produces the same sequence

Sonic Pi's sync waits for the next cue from that point, so a loop with sync at the top delays its first pass by up to one cue period

Sonic Pi's use_bpm is thread-local; setting it in one live_loop does not change the tempo in another

Sonic Pi's with_fx wraps a code block, not a voice; only play/sample calls inside the do…end block are processed through the effect

Sound level meters measure area noise while personal dosimeters measure individual cumulative exposure

Sound recordings were not protected by US copyright until 1976

Sound synthesis generates new sound; signal processing modifies an existing sound

Sound waves are pressure variations in air that the cochlea decodes as electrical signals

Source waveform sets harmonic complexity in a ladder from sine (pure) to noise (harsh)

South African producers took imported house music and reinterpreted it into their own distinct sound

Spatially closer elements are perceived as belonging to the same group

Speed garage emerged when DJ EZ played US garage house at 130 BPM instead of 120 BPM to match UK hardcore energy

Speed garage's defining move was pitching US garage records up to add energy and a distinctly UK feel

Sporked ChucK shreds die when their parent shred ends

Square brackets in mini-notation subdivide one step into a nested sub-sequence

sRGB is the default internet color space, matching Rec. 709 primaries with D65 white point

Stable Diffusion is a pipeline of three neural networks, not a single monolithic model

Stable Diffusion runs in two modes: text-to-image and image-plus-text (img2img)

Standard two-letter abbreviations map to drum kit sounds in Strudel's default sample set

Standing to stretch and walk every 30-60 minutes prevents cumulative RSI from long sessions

Staring at a hue fatigues its retinal receptors, producing the complementary color as an after-image

Strudel audio effects are chainable methods that accept patterned values

Strudel gain stacks multiplicatively and clips — several loud voices distort, so keep per-voice gain well under 1

Strudel is a browser-native port of TidalCycles that requires no installation and runs on any device with a web browser

Strudel is a browser-native, Tidal-style pattern language that shares TidalCycles' syntax

Strudel mini-notation * speeds hits into one step's time while ! replicates across steps — mixing them changes the rhythm