Atoms
5,034 knowledge atoms — one concept each, the smallest teachable units. To find something specific, use search or browse by domain, level or type.
Showing 241–300 of 5,034 · page 5 / 84
A ChucK UGen only produces audio if it is chucked transitively to `dac`
A club's resident DJ can steer the direction of an entire genre through their programming
A cluster of small European labels curated microhouse's identity before the term existed
A coil of wire near a magnetic field picks up electromagnetic signals and acts as a low-frequency antenna or microphone
A color space's gamut is the subset of all human-visible colors it can reproduce
A color's 'quality' is its hue position in the color circle; its 'quantity' (brilliance) is its lightness or darkness
A comma inside a mini-notation string stacks two voices simultaneously; it is not a rest
A community Google Colab notebook enables RAVE training without local GPU hardware
A compressor is an automatic volume control that rides gain down when a signal exceeds a threshold
A compressor's ratio sets how much of the signal above the threshold is turned down
A control voltage can only do three things: rise, fall, or stay constant
A DAW that matches your mental model removes the technical bottleneck between idea and recording
A demoparty is a weekend gathering where demosceners compete in categorised compos judged live
A demoscene group is built around three core roles: coder, musician, and graphician
A disco edit extends and resequences the most dance-friendly sections of a track, historically made with tape and scissors
A DJ mixer controls what the audience hears and what the DJ monitors in headphones
A dot after a note extends its duration by half, creating in-between values useful for compound rhythms
A drum kit's four functional slots each have a default placement: kick=pulse, snare=backbeat, hi-hat=subdivision, percussion=fill
A drum pattern sets the groove by placing kick, snare, and hi-hat on specific beats in a bar
A dynamic speaker and a dynamic microphone are the same reversible device: coil, magnet, and diaphragm
A Eurorack ribbon cable must be connected with its coloured stripe on the correct (bottom) side
A Eurorack system's total module current draw must stay within its power supply's capacity
A fader that won't hold a stable level tells you the track needs processing
A filter cutoff envelope mimics the brightness-decay of acoustic instruments
A filter selectively attenuates or boosts specific frequency ranges in a signal
A first Eurorack case should be at least 3U x 84 HP, and 6U x 84-104 HP gives room to grow without outgrowing quickly
A for loop repeats a code block under init, test, and update, turning one drawing procedure into a whole pattern
A gate stays high for a note's duration; a trigger is a brief pulse that fires one event
A genre can predate its name by years — 'dub techno' was coined in The Wire in 2001, ~8 years after the music appeared
A genre's canonical tempo can be set by the venue it serves, not by musical rule
A Glicol feedback bus with gain ≥ 1 explodes — keep loop gain below 1
A GLSL double-buffer feedback pass with gain ≥ 1 saturates to white within a few frames
A GLSL fragment shader is a function that maps each pixel's (x,y) coordinate to an output RGB color, run in parallel for every pixel
A GLSL vector's components have interchangeable names: .xyzw, .rgba, .stpq, and [i]
A glslViewer feedback buffer only fills if its render code is wrapped in the matching `#ifdef`
A good solder joint requires heating both surfaces to re-melt a pre-tinned layer of solder, not dropping molten solder onto cold metal
A great monitor in a bad acoustic room cannot produce accurate mastering decisions
A hard `step` edge aliases in GLSL — use `smoothstep` with a `fwidth` width for anti-aliasing
A harmonic spectrum has partials at exact integer multiples of a fundamental frequency
A house track proven on the dancefloor could still be blocked by a label's gatekeeping before release
A Hydra array argument sequences values one per BPM cycle, not a smooth ramp or average
A Hydra chain without `.out()` builds a texture that is never rendered — no error, just black
A Hydra patch is a left-to-right chain of dot-joined functions, modeled on modular-synth cabling
A live coder is like an improvising composer: code is the score and the computer performs it while the audience watches it being written
A low-pass filter at mid cutoff with minimal resonance murks a bright oscillator into a low-end bass
A low-pass filter passes frequencies below its cutoff and attenuates those above it
A major key and its relative minor share the same key signature but have different tonics (relative minor tonic = 6th degree of major)
A major triad = root + major third (4 semitones) + minor third (3 semitones); minor triad reverses the third order
A master clock sends pulse streams that synchronize all time-based modules in a patch
A modular synth carries audio, control voltage, and gate/trigger signals on identical jacks, and the distinction is convention not physics
A modular synthesizer is an open system where practically anything can connect to anything
A musical interval's number name counts how many letter classes separate two notes
A musical tone is a complex blend of harmonic partials whose ratios are whole-number multiples of the fundamental
A netlabel distributes music primarily online, often free and under Creative Commons
A noise dose of 100% marks the daily exposure limit, computed as a time-weighted average
A pattern is where we perceive the structure of its making in the structure of its outcome
A piezo disk exploits the reversible crystal-electricity effect to work as a contact microphone or a driver
A pitch class is one of the 12 chromatic notes named independently of octave
A ported monitor's port resonance skews low-end mixing judgment through steep rolloff, ringing, and midrange smearing
A quantizer snaps an incoming control voltage to the nearest note of a chosen scale, turning free-running CV into melody