Spaceship Computer Beeps

How it's made

Source

a spaceship console emitting short data-processing beeps. Each beep is a synthesized tone: a sine fundamental plus a quieter 2nd and 3rd partial (a thin square-like colour), 30–110 ms long.

Envelope

8 ms raised-cosine-like attack and a 10–25 ms exponential release, so the gate never clicks; a tiny upward pitch glide (≈ 1.5 %) in the first 15 ms gives a "digital chirp" onset.

Events

beeps arrive as a sparse Poisson process (0.4–3 clusters/s); a cluster holds 1–4 blips 70–130 ms apart, like a short readout, with pitches drawn from a pentatonic-like ladder (500–3200 Hz), never a melody.

Bed

a very quiet 2-oscillator electronic hum (≈ 110 Hz and 165 Hz, slow drift) and a band-limited hiss, 30 dB below the beeps, so the room is alive between events.

Variation

every blip draws its pitch step, level, length and pan from the voice `rng`; macros set density, register, cluster size and brightness; presets move between idle console, busy processing and high alert-less scanning.

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