"Shot sounds sound like a toy" and "death sounds from ship are really
cheap", and there was no arguing with either. The shot was a bare
descending sine, which is the sound every toy ray gun has ever made. The
death was one band of filtered noise with a sine under it - thin, and over
before the eye had finished with the explosion.
The synthesis is rewritten rather than tuned, because the shape was the
problem:
LAYERS, not a waveform. A bang is a crack, then a body, then a tail, and
they have different lengths. One envelope over one source cannot be any
of those things, so the explosions now run three clocks - the crack is
done in a fifth of the length, the roar runs most of it, and sparse
debris keeps falling afterwards so there is an aftermath rather than a
stop.
A SUB. Below about 80Hz is where "big" lives; without it an explosion is
a hiss however loud you play it. Measured: 74% of a ship death's energy
and 86% of a structure's now sits under 200Hz, against almost none
before.
SATURATION. Soft-clipping folds in harmonics, so a sound reads as loud
rather than merely being loud - and stops peak normalisation flattening
everything into the same quiet mush.
DETUNED PARTIALS on the shot. Three of them at deliberately wrong ratios
beat against each other and read as a mechanism; the single sine was the
whole of the toy problem. A noise transient and a sub thump under it give
it something to hit with.
Lengths went up with the weight: the ship death from 0.85s to 1.45s and the
structure from 1.6s to 2.3s, both audible to the end rather than gone in the
first third.
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