Reactor Core Hum

How it's made

Source

a fusion-style reactor core heard through an engine-room bulkhead. Heavy rotating and electromagnetic machinery radiates a mains-like harmonic drone: a fundamental near 55 Hz with harmonics 2-6 (odd ones stronger).

Body

the steel shell and coolant pipes act as a low-pass; two slightly detuned copies of every partial (about 0.2 Hz apart) beat against each other, giving a slow chorus. Brown-noise machinery rumble (25-130 Hz) fills the floor beneath the tones.

Envelope

the core pulses with a slow throb (about 0.8 Hz) that swells level and opens a low-pass from ~300 Hz to ~1.6 kHz, so the upper harmonics breathe more than the fundamental; the loop holds whole throb cycles.

Events

faint electric crackle: sparse unipolar impulses band-passed at 2-6 kHz, denser at the throb peak, as corona discharge around the magnetic coils.

Variation

`rng` picks the beat offsets, start phases and slow drift of the throb speed; presets move the pitch, throb rate and depth, brightness, crackle and rumble from a calm idle to an overloaded core.

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