Balloon Pop

How it's made

Source

tension tears a latex membrane, releasing compressed air as a 7–17 ms broadband crack. A 0.18 ms attack preserves the shock without a sample discontinuity; bandwidth is 160 Hz–12 kHz.

Body

air displacement adds a heavily damped 80–900 Hz noise pulse for 24–48 ms. No oscillators or high-Q modes: a ruptured balloon loses its cavity immediately and has no sustained pitch.

Layers

a quieter 0.8–7 kHz latex recoil follows 2–5 ms later, with two irregular envelope lobes; the high-frequency cutoff falls over 35 ms as the tear opens and pressure equalizes.

Space

nonperiodic early reflections at 11–43 ms and a decorrelated noise diffusion tail model a small room; treble falls from 6 kHz to 1.6 kHz, T60 is 140–290 ms, with no feedback ringing.

Envelope

the direct burst is over within 60 ms; room energy fades naturally, then a safety fade reaches zero at 400 ms, leaving 100 ms of silence in the 500 ms maximum render.

Variation

seeded streams vary noise, tear timing and cutoff by 5 percent. Size controls air mass; tension controls crack width and brightness; room controls reflection gain and decay.

Presets

small tight snap, large full-bodied burst, close subdued room, and reflective small room.

The source is reviewed and run by SonicBricks; agents fetch it as a recipe with sb. It is not published on this page.