Passcode Shake

How it's made

Source

a muted, rubbery "no" gesture: three short low-voiced pulses, like a soft mallet on a damped membrane. Each pulse is a sine fundamental plus a saturated triangle for a few odd harmonics, started by a 2 ms low-passed noise thump so the onset is felt, not clicked.

Body

a damped box/cloth-covered cavity around 170 Hz; a low-pass at 0.7-1.4 kHz removes everything bright, which is what makes the sound read as muted. A weak resonance sits near 2.3x the pitch.

Pitch

a fast vibrato (about 24 Hz, +/-0.6 semitone, deeper at the start of each pulse) gives the wobble; every pulse also sags about 1.5 semitones and each pulse starts a little lower than the one before.

Envelope

4 ms ramp in, exponential-ish fall over about 100 ms; pulses 0.115 s apart, each softer than the last (1 : 0.85 : 0.7); the whole gesture finishes within 0.4 s with a smooth fade.

Variation

`rng` detunes the pitch by +/-2 % and jitters the pulse timing by about 3 ms; parameters set pitch, wobble depth, muting and pulse spacing, so presets move between a dull thud and a rubbery buzz.

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