Tape Hiss for Slow Mornings

The brief

Compose real music with no sample library.

The idea

A synthesiser that exists only as a script: electric piano by FM, marimba by modal synthesis, reverb by a feedback delay network, tape wow by a wandering delay line. Then five pieces for it, from a dub techno track to a piece of two-player phase music.

Decisions

• Everything starts as a sine wave or noise, so the EP contains no recorded sound.
• Sunprint phases two identical patterns against each other, the way the film and the print drift.
• Tape wobble, crackle and a soft top end keep it from sounding clinical.
• Levels were checked by measurement and form by spectrogram.

How it came together

1. Wrote an offline synth with oscillators, filters, delay, reverb and master limiter.
2. Composed each piece in code as note lists and rules.
3. Rendered all five tracks in 43 seconds and inspected spectrograms for form and level.

How it works

One script is the instrument and another is the score. Every sample is computed in JavaScript at 44.1 kHz, then encoded to MP3 with FFmpeg.