Night Kitchen

How it's made

Source

a refrigerator compressor running in a dark kitchen. The motor and piston drive the cabinet at the mains frequency (60 Hz) and its harmonics; the cabinet radiates the fundamental poorly, so 120–360 Hz carry most of the energy, with a gentle fall-off up to ~700 Hz.

Body

the steel cabinet and the compressor shell add broad low-mid resonances (~95 and ~190 Hz, Q ≈ 2.5) to a brown-noise bed; refrigerant flow adds a very faint pink hiss at 1–3 kHz.

Room

a small tiled room (~3 x 3 m) has a quiet, dark air bed (pink, low-passed near 700 Hz) with standing-wave boosts around 70 and 140 Hz that make the hum feel enclosed.

Envelope

the piston adds a 30 Hz (half-mains) pulsation of about 2 dB depth to the motor tone; the level otherwise stays steady and breathes by about ±1 dB as the motor load varies (slow drift, ~0.3 targets/s) and its pitch wanders by under 0.1 %. Left and right are decorrelated.

Events

loose items on a shelf rattle faintly as sparse poisson ticks (0.1–1 per second), each a 20–60 ms resonant burst at 1.2–3.2 kHz followed by a softer second tick.

Variation

`rng` tunes partial phases and amplitudes, tick pitch, timing and pan; presets move the balance between hum, hiss, room air and rattle.

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