Hologram Flicker

How it's made

Source

a projected light field driven by an unstable power stage. The carrier is a thin electrical hum: a pure tone near 1.4 kHz with weak 2nd and 3rd harmonics, plus a second tone detuned by about 1.5 Hz that makes the hum slowly beat and shimmer.

Body

a high-pass at 600 Hz keeps it thin; a 100 Hz amplitude ripple (rectified mains) adds a faint buzz and a slow random drift of 1-2 % pitch makes the projector feel alive, never static.

Envelope

the whole field is gated by random dropouts of 40-350 ms. Each one falls in 4 ms and returns in 6 ms (no clicks); some come as double flutters. Between dropouts the level wobbles by a few percent.

Crackle

every dropout edge sparks a burst of 3-7 micro ticks of band-passed noise at 2-7 kHz within 30 ms, plus a very sparse bed of single bursts. Ticks are loudest at the edges, as arcing happens on switching.

Variation

`rng` places the dropouts, jitters pitch, tick timing, strength and pan; macros set dropout density, depth and crackle level, and the presets move between a stable ghost and a failing projector.

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