Falling Leaves

How it's made

Source

dry leaf laminae flex during descent, then touch and scrape the ground; filtered noise models irregular surface friction, with band-limited sparse grains for brittle edges.

Body

broad, heavily damped leaf bands at 650-1500 Hz and 2-6 kHz; no sustained pitched modes. A 6-9 kHz low-pass limits edge fizz; a 260 Hz high-pass removes wind and ground thumps.

Envelope

60-220 ms flutter precedes a 3-8 ms contact attack and 35-90 ms release; sliding follows in two or three diminishing lobes over 0.25-1.2 s as the leaf catches and releases.

Events

irregular arrivals at 0.12-2.2 per second, clustered by slow 2-5 s activity groups; gaps remain quiet. Flutter modulates at 11-23 Hz with irregular amplitude rather than a constant hiss bed.

Variation

independent seeded noise, contact timing, broad-band centres, strength and close pan. Density controls arrivals, dryness the edge spectrum, travel the scrape length and balance.

Space

dry close perspective, no reverberation. Presets isolate sparse landings, pavement skitters, clustered brittle tumbles and broader soft leaf flutters.

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