Atoms
5,034 knowledge atoms — one concept each, the smallest teachable units. This is the reference library, not a course: atoms back the hands-on lessons on the two course paths and are here to look up, not to learn from in order. To find something specific, use search or browse by domain, level or type.
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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