Atoms

Slowing the master tape before recording vocals raises their pitch on playback — the trick behind Newcleus's cartoon voices

Smoothstep with adjustable limits controls where a procedural pattern transitions from dark to light

smoothstep() creates smooth transitions between two thresholds, enabling anti-aliased edges in shaders

Soft Light is a gentler Overlay where pure black or white inputs do not produce pure black or white outputs

Some founding artists of electroclash rejected the genre label, signing an anti-electroclash manifesto against commercial co-optation

sometimes/often/every apply transformations probabilistically or periodically in Strudel

Sonic Pi is a strongly-timed language where sleep controls when events occur rather than pausing execution

Sonic Pi plays external audio files by passing a file path string to sample

Sonic Pi ring chain methods transform rings immutably, returning a new ring without modifying the original

Sonic Pi, SuperCollider, Strudel, and Tidal are theory-native for harmony; Glicol, ChucK, and Punctual require hand-spelling frequencies

Sonic Pi's live_loop runs each named loop as a concurrent thread you can edit while it plays

Sonic Pi's onset: option indexes a sample's drum hits like a list, so you can play individual hits by number

Sonic Pi's start: and finish: opts play arbitrary sub-sections of a sample

Sonification maps data to sound to convey scientific meaning; music creates self-contained meaning in form — the same audio can be both

Soulful house foregrounds gospel-influenced vocals with verse-chorus song structure over house beats

Sound objects have time-varying properties; notes are homogeneous abstractions

Sound pressure drops 6 dB for every doubling of distance from a point source in free field

Sound reaches Hydra through exactly one path: a 4-element FFT array filled from Strudel's Web-Audio analyser — no MIDI, OSC, or per-instrument bus exists

SoundIn reads from hardware audio input buses; use headphones to prevent feedback

SoundIn.ar reads from the sound card's input buses; use headphones to prevent feedback

Sounds uploaded to Freesound are automatically processed then manually moderated before appearing publicly

SOURCE automatically logs every used sound to a dated file, creating a ready-made CC attribution record

SOURCE treats a CC-licensed sound library as a live instrument rather than a static sample bank

Spatial montage presents multiple images simultaneously rather than sequentially, enabling parallel narratives and immersive environments

Speaker cable must be large-gauge to minimize resistance and preserve amplifier damping factor

Spectral mixing assigns each sound its own frequency space to prevent masking

Spectral tilt (filter cutoff) is the single most expressive timbral move and the primary brightness control

speed() changes sample playback rate; negative values reverse the audio waveform

Spend mixing time where it sells the production, not evenly across every track

Spiegel's 1981 taxonomy of twelve pattern-transformation classes underpins algorithmic pattern libraries

splice time-stretches each chopped segment to its event duration; chop does not

Spout (Windows) and Syphon (macOS) share live video between applications on one machine

spread() generates a Euclidean boolean ring for rhythmic hit placement in Sonic Pi

Spreading a tuned kick sample across a sampler's keys lets you play the kick itself as a melodic bassline

Square brackets in Tidal mini-notation create sub-patterns that fit multiple events into a single step

Squaring a band value produces a soft onset-ish punch that pops on loud hits without requiring true onset detection

Squash and stretch give animated objects the illusion of weight and volume

Squash-and-stretch animation preserves volume by inversely scaling perpendicular axes

stack() layers multiple independent patterns into one simultaneous polyphonic output

Stacking colors darkest-on-top makes the eye read a transparent veil even though every layer is opaque

Stacking multiple 'stereo' sources hard left and right creates Big Mono — width without real stereo

Staging presents an idea so that it reads clearly to the audience

Starting modular with a minimal voice then expanding incrementally is recommended over buying many modules at once

Stem separation is a practical on-ramp to building personal sample banks from any released track

Step sequencing builds patterns fast but its dead-on-grid timing must be loosened for feel-driven genres

Stepwise melodic motion sounds smooth while leaps sound dramatic and should resolve back by step

Strobe/flash is a high-impact accent that must be used sparingly because of photosensitivity risk, never as a default

Strudel and Hydra have no shared clock — Hydra's bpm and Strudel's transport are independent and will drift

Strudel samples may not sound on the first play until you stop and restart

Strudel signals are continuous time functions that drive parameters smoothly between values

Strudel's built-in signals (sine, saw, square, rand, perlin) continuously modulate effect parameters

Sub-bass at extreme volumes produces physical, full-body crowd responses that feel like a delayed wave through the audience

Subgrouping routes related tracks to a shared bus controlled by one fader

Subtle tube simulation or overdrive warms a bassline, but too much distortion undoes it

Subtractive synthesis sculpts a complex source by filtering away unwanted frequencies

Summing a stereo mix to mono lifts centred sounds ~3 dB relative to edge-panned ones

Summing many oscillators in additive synthesis accumulates noise floor whereas subtractive synthesis can filter noise away

Summing N oscillators multiplies amplitude by N; dividing by N after summing prevents clipping

SuperCollider has four enclosure types: () for argument lists and code blocks, [] for arrays, {} for functions, and "" for strings

SuperCollider IDE workflow requires Shift-Cmd-B to select a code block and Shift-Enter to evaluate it