Distant Construction Site

How it's made

Source

three independent site activities a block away. A framing hammer strikes nails in bursts of 3-7 blows (0.4-0.65 s apart); a rotary-percussion drill runs for 1-3.5 s at a time (a 90-110 Hz motor and gearbox buzz, hammered at about 28 impacts per second); a reversing truck sounds a ~1 kHz square-wave beeper at about 1 Hz, 50 % duty, in groups of 4-8 beeps.

Body

a nail strike is a 4 ms noise click that excites a damped wooden board (a few modes, 40-150 ms) and a slap echo from a facing wall 0.15-0.3 s later; the drill adds a 600-1500 Hz bandpassed masonry rasp; the beeper is rich in odd harmonics.

Propagation

air absorption and buildings remove everything above 1.5-5 kHz, so every layer is low-passed and the hammer loses its click: only the thump and low wood tone survive. A low pink rumble of distant machinery and traffic (40-400 Hz) fills the gaps and breathes with slow gusts.

Envelope

hammer blows decay in under 0.3 s; the drill spins up over 0.3 s, wanders +-4 % in speed under load and winds down over 0.4 s; beeps have 4 ms edges so they never click.

Variation

`rng` places every burst, jitters blow spacing, strength, pitch of the board, pan and echo time; the activity parameters scale how often each source is active, `distance` sets the muffling.

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