Large Explosion

How it's made

Source

a close, large detonation. Burning propellant releases a pressure front: a 5-15 ms broadband shock whose spectrum collapses from ~9 kHz to ~130 Hz in under a second as the fireball expands, driven hard into a saturator because the close-range wave is non-linear (flat-topped, dense, wide).

Body

the shock excites air and ground. A sine "thump" falls from ~110 Hz to ~34 Hz, a sub sine at ~36 Hz swells over ~0.3 s and rings for ~3.5 s, and brown noise low-passed to 70-500 Hz carries the chest-felt rumble. A short 1.8-4 kHz crack on top gives the blast its bite.

Envelope

attack in 3 ms, the main blast decays in ~0.8-1.3 s, the sub swell peaks near 0.3 s and fades by ~3.8 s; the whole sound is closed by a fade to silence at ~4.5 s.

Fire tail

after the blast, burning debris roars (pink noise band at 1.8 kHz falling to 400 Hz) and crackles (sparse high-passed impulses plus Poisson wood-like pops) with a level that thins out over ~4 s.

Variation

`rng` jitters pop timing, pitch and pan and decorrelates left/right noise; `size` lowers the thump and lengthens blast and rumble; `brightness` opens the shock and crack; `fire` sets the crackling tail; `sub` the swell weight; `drive` the saturation.

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