Old Floorboard Creak

How it's made

Source

a floorboard bends slowly; sticking joints release in pitched friction cycles at 110-310 Hz. A band-limited saw with irregular pitch wander models slip, mixed with filtered fibre friction noise.

Body

broad board modes near 170, 440 and 910 Hz colour the rubbing; Q 2-5 keeps the wood dry. Short joint releases excite damped modes at 190, 490 and 1030 Hz with 45-110 ms decay.

Envelope

pressure rises over 120 ms, stalls near mid-stroke, then builds a second softer squeal. Unloading lowers the pitch and fades over the last 220 ms; default action lasts about 1.5 s.

Modulation

slow pitch bends follow load; 17-29 Hz flutter and random wander roughen the slip cycles. Uneven 6-13 Hz amplitude pulses model intermittent grip without discontinuous hard gating.

Variation

seeded tuning, grain timing and wander differ per instance; size sets board resonances, tension sets squeal pitch, roughness sets grain and flutter, and hesitation sets the central stall.

Presets

heavy broad-board groan, dry narrow-board squeal, loose pulsing joint, and gentle slow loading.

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