Atoms

CC BY-SA is the 'copyleft' music license: derivatives must be released under the same terms, creating a self-perpetuating commons

CC-licensed platforms like ccMixter and Free Music Archive enable spontaneous worldwide artist collaborations

CC0 allows a creator to waive all rights to a work, placing it fully in the public domain with no conditions on use

Cellular automata generate emergent global patterns from cells that update on local neighbour rules

CFG scale in ComfyUI's KSampler balances prompt adherence against image quality

CFG scale in Deforum controls prompt adherence — too high saturates and distorts, too low drifts off-prompt

Changing one color in a repeating pattern shifts the apparent color of all others — the Bezold Effect

Changing the FM modulator waveform (square, sine, sawtooth) shifts the Reese's harmonic character

Charanjit Singh's 1982 album used a TB-303 prominently five years before acid house was named

Cheap mass-market grotbox speakers reveal how a mix translates to the worst-case playback scenario

Check a finished mix on as many playback systems as possible for translation

Check sub-bass clashes with headphones during composition, not during mixdown

Checking a mix in mono reveals phase problems, hidden balances, and optimal panning positions

Choose the scale, chord, and grid first, then let chance fill them; never randomize constraints and content at once

Choosing a HAP variant trades alpha support and colour fidelity against data-rate

Choosing a scale is the single highest-leverage harmonic decision — it sets mood before any chord is played

Chop a loop and map its slices across the keyboard to re-trigger it in a lopsided grime rhythm

Chopping a vocal into sampler pads and shortening release turns it into a percussive element

Chopping and re-sequencing a sample turns any audio into a rhythmic-melodic instrument — timbre and rhythm at once

Chords in a Pbind are written as nested lists inside the pitch key

Chorus, flanger, and phaser all create frequency notches but differ in delay length and notch spacing

Chosen subdivision sets a genre's speed feel independently of tempo

ChucK is strongly-timed: advancing 'now' drives synthesis with sample-accurate control

ChucK wires Unit Generators into a signal chain with the ChucK operator =>

chunk applies a transformation to a different Nth of the cycle each cycle, rotating the window

chunk divides a pattern into n parts and transforms a different part each cycle

CIE color matching functions empirically measure how much RGB is needed per spectral wavelength

CIE XYZ is the device-independent hub space used for all color space conversions

Circuit bending extracts unexpected sounds from found electronics by making arbitrary cross-connections on circuit boards

Circuit packaging — cigar box, plexiglass sandwich, or store-bought enclosure — is as much an aesthetic decision as a functional one

Circuit packaging choices trade off accessibility (cigar box, stealth) against durability (sandwich, traditional enclosure)

Classic fractal coloring maps iteration count or distance to a cycled multi-stop ramp with a dark base so bright filaments glow

Classic hip-hop bass is a sub-bass locked to the chord roots of the sampled harmony

Clave patterns doubled in speed adapt the Latin groove framework to a single faster bar

Clearing a sample requires separate permissions from both the master recording owner and the song's publisher

Click And Go provides a visual one-click interface for selecting colors and gobos on fixture channels

CLIP jointly trains text and image encoders so matching pairs get high cosine similarity

Clip launch quantization in AbletonOSC maps integer codes to musical durations, from None to 1/32

Clip-triggering in Ableton enables 'pseudo-live' performance where pre-programmed sequences are replayed with minimal real-time decision-making

Clock dividers and multipliers derive slower or faster tempo-locked pulse streams from a master clock

Close voicings (within one octave) are dense and mid-heavy; open voicings (spread across octaves) are spacious with a cleaner low end

Club DJs acted as A&R, deciding which tracks were worth releasing by testing crowd reaction on the floor

Club music chops rap acapellas and lo-fi voice recordings into percussive vocal loops

Coaxial drivers emit the whole spectrum from one point, minimizing inter-driver comb filtering

Coincident mic arrays sum to mono cleanly because the capsules share one point in space

Collaborative live coding platforms let multiple performers share a live code environment in real time

Color arithmetic must be done in linear light, not in gamma-encoded values

Color harmony systems fail in practice because quantity, form, lighting, and context continuously override the prescribed relationships

Colored lights produce complementary-colored shadows, and multiple colored light sources create multiple hued shadows

colorMode(HSB) makes hue, saturation, and brightness independently controllable axes

Colors outside a color space's gamut require mathematically negative primary values

ComfyUI embeds the full workflow JSON in generated PNG files

ComfyUI models a diffusion pipeline as a directed graph of typed nodes

ComfyUI only re-executes nodes whose inputs have changed since the last run

ComfyUI supports {option|option} wildcard syntax in text prompts for random variation

ComfyUI weights a prompt term with (term:weight) syntax to strengthen or weaken it

ComfyUI's security scope is limited to localhost by design — --listen exposes the server to the network at user's risk

ComfyUI's smart memory manager offloads models to CPU when GPU VRAM is insufficient

Comma-separated note values in Strudel produce chords; interval notation builds chord types

Comma-separated patterns inside square brackets create polyrhythms in Tidal