Atoms

Dark ambient draws on industrial and ambient to build ominous drones and dread

Dark Berlin techno drums run at 120–130 BPM with 50–55% swing using classic analogue hits and effected noise

Dark garage production in the late 1990s was the common ancestor of both grime and dubstep

Dark psytrance uses horror-film samples where mainstream psytrance uses science-fiction samples

DAW scale-snap tools correct out-of-key notes without requiring theory knowledge

Decibels express amplitude on a log scale because human loudness perception is logarithmic

Deep house is a slightly slower house variant (~120 BPM) with stronger soul, jazz, and funk influences

Deep house originated with Larry Heard (Mr Fingers) returning house music toward soulful disco warmth in 1985–86

Deep house's characteristic harmonic sound comes from jazz-influenced minor7 and major7 chords rather than simpler triads

Deep learning represents the world as a hierarchy of concepts, each built from simpler ones

Delays shorter than ~25-35 ms are heard as timbre or doubling, not as distinct echoes

Deliver mixes to mastering with headroom rather than hot levels — you lose no quality with peaks around -10 dB

Derrick May's 'Strings of Life' defined Detroit techno by fusing European electro with funk through machines

Detroit electro fused machine-funk with Afrofuturist sci-fi imagery to create a robotic aesthetic

Detroit techno arose from radio station competition that gave DJs creative autonomy and budget to make exclusive music

Detroit techno drew from Krautrock and industrial minimalism, creating a through-line to ambient house

Detroit techno found its first large audience in Europe — especially the UK — before achieving recognition at home in the US

Detroit techno keeps the kick a plain four-on-the-floor with no ghost hits

Detroit techno repurposed industrial technology as a Black artistic strategy — 'a black secret'

Detroit techno's early industrial edge came from techno and industrial club scenes physically cross-pollinating their audiences

Detroit techno's founding artists frame the music as an expression of Black working-class survival

Detroit techno's futurism grew from a post-riot industrial city where dreaming of the future was a way to escape it

Detroit's post-industrial desolation and economic isolation created the creative conditions for techno's emergence

Developing creative coding craft requires deliberate repetitive practice analogous to a musician playing scales

Dick Higgins' 'intermedia' names a new entity that emerges from merging two art forms rather than merely adding them

Different live-coding tools front different first skills, so tool choice sets your first learning curve

Digital audio represents a waveform as a stream of numeric amplitude values called samples

Digital Mystikz introduced sound system culture and dub values to dubstep through the DMZ night

Digital technology moved sampling and remix from professional studios to bedrooms, creating a new mass-producer culture

Dividing gl_FragCoord by u_resolution maps pixel coordinates to the [0,1] UV range

DJ Alfredo at Amnesia Ibiza proved a diverse mixed-format playlist could unite a diverse crowd under one dancefloor

DJ break compilations like Ultimate Breaks and Beats were how sampled drum breaks spread to producers

DJ headphone monitoring requires three controls: cue buttons, mix knob, and volume

DJ Kool Herc extended the drum break by alternating the same record across two turntables

DJ master output meters should stay loud but never push into the red

DJs can transition between channels using individual channel faders or the crossfader

DMX defines 512 channels per universe, each with a 0–255 value range

DnB is an intensified evolution of breakbeat: chopped and reprocessed loops at higher speed

DnB tempo rose from ~130 BPM in 1990–91 to a stable 170–180 BPM by 1996, where it has remained

Donk (Scouse House) is defined by the 'pipe' FM sample on the offbeat in North West England

Doubling a frequency raises the pitch by exactly one octave

Downtempo is atmospheric electronic music with beats around 90 BPM, slower than dance music

Dozens of traditional world-music timelines are rotations of Euclidean rhythms

Drawing with semi-transparent fill and no background clear lets shapes accumulate as a trace

Drone metal fuses the drone with high-volume distorted guitar, pioneered by Earth and Sunn O)))

Drum & bass fragmented into three broadly recognized poles: jump-up (party), liquid (melodic/soulful), and tech/neuro (complex/dark)

Drum and bass evolved from UK breakbeat hardcore by stripping rave elements and emphasising bass and complex drums

Drum sample choice should match the genre before any programming begins

Dub shaped dubstep through three channels: the instrumental format, a sound-manipulation methodology, and the dub genre's aesthetics

Dub techno and dubstep are not closely related despite both drawing on Jamaican dub

Dub techno combines the ambient beauty of dub with the steady groove of techno

Dub techno fuses Jamaican dub's echo-heavy production with Detroit techno's minimal, repetitive structures

Dub techno is defined by reverberating soundscapes, minimalism, subdued groovy rhythms, and dub techniques (echo/dropouts/phase-shift)

Dub techno runs slower than mainline techno, typically 110-125 BPM

Dubstep emerged as a residue of UK garage when a cohort kept making their sound after the scene moved on

Dubstep is more minimalistic than other garage, foregrounding sub-bass frequencies over dense arrangement

Dubstep runs at ~140 BPM but the snare on beat 3 makes the groove feel like ~70 BPM half-time

Dubstep sits around 140 BPM, a bass-led tempo slower than drum & bass

Dubstep's signature off-beat snare originated from a producer deliberately placing the snare on beat three instead of two/four

Dutch trance's global dominance was built on vertically integrated organizations combining events, labels, and DJs