I, For One, Welcome Our New Washed-Out Granulated Ambient Wind-Chime Overlords: Sound Design On The Edge Of Reason

I've been in the music-making business for a minute now, and two things I've learned: 

1. Nothing beats a new sound for inspiration. 

2. There are no rules for how to get that new sound. If there were, it wouldn't be new. 

When talking to our peers in the plugin business, we often draw a distinction between front-end creative companies and back-end mix companies. The former make synths and insert effects, while the latter make mix and mastering tools and send effects. Some companies do both on the regular, but for the most part, plugin companies fall in to those two categories. Sure, we have the occasional mix tool, and your reverb company might try a saturation plugin on for size, but on the whole, someone that specializes in reverbs and EQs isn't going to make a buffer effect, and vice-versa. 

Audio Damage is very much the front-end creative sort of company, and we often release plugins that do not have a set purpose; these are tools created not to solve a particular problem, but to create new problems you weren't aware you had! Problems like "what the hell am I listening to?" and "how on earth will I ever make a track out of this?" My wife, getting in to the spirit of things, helpfully offered "what the actual f**k is that racket coming out of your office and can you please make it stop?" as an example. Anyhow, this year we've gone a bit buck wild in the cheap-n-cheerful sound science department, releasing four (!!!) new sound design products, none of which has an exact existing parallel. The three Motion Effects (Ascent, Descent, and Traverse) and our new sequenced resonator effect, Tessera, all are meant to serve as windows to new possibilities, instead of methods for recreating some boomer nonsense that was old-fashioned in the 80s, never mind 2026. 

Sound design, in and of itself, is an exploration of possibilities. You can create pretty much any sound from any other sound. or even from no sound at all at all, and while creating or re-creating a particular sound can be helped by dedicated tools or a deep knowledge-base from which to work, if you have no particular destination in mind, the possibilities are literally infinite. Take the first sound example above. This little sound is a preset I created in Continua to serve as an impulse for testing Tessera. It's just a short little noisy boop, and relatively uninteresting and perhaps even unusable by itself. 

Since this sound was designed to drive Tessera specifically, throwing Tessera on there will give good results. Any percussive sound, especially with a bit of noise, will really get those resonators cranking. The second sound example is the result of fiddling a bit with the default preset. The source is just that boop above, a middle C note once every measure. Tessera, being a stack of tuned resonators (that I have tuned to a Cmin9 chord) is going to turn pretty much any input source in to melodic material, playing in repeatable patterns. Just keeping that knowledge in your head allows you to look at any percussion sound in your sample folder in a new light. "How will this excite that resonator? Do I have any other resonators? How about if I stack them?" And we're off to the races.

On example 03, I add Traverse to the chain, to add some hairs ("hair" is our internal company designator for adding saturation) and double up the delay feedback. Since Traverse is quite warbly and hairy, the personality of the sound becomes thicker. Luckily, we have a solve for that! 

Enter Descent, whose job is to take one big sound and break it up in to a bunch of small sounds. When you listen to example 04, you'll hear Descent with shortish size and smallish count parameters, doing what it does best: granulating things. If you compare this to the original 01 sound example, you'll see that we have successfully turned a single sound in to thousands of sounds, made them play a gigantic 12-note chord, and dragged them out in to what any reasonable person would describe as a scape.

Finally, throwing Ascent on there gives it a nice finishing sheen by sanding off all the corners. Example 05 has the entire chain live at once, and our single tiny boop that could have come from anything really has become a huge evolving swarm of ambient bees singing the song of their people, all in the space of a few minutes of knob-twiddling. Applying automation to any and all parameters will further animate things; it is fun to record these sorts of events and save them in folders for later. I do this all the time, and always have multi-measure loops of pre-scaped sounds for ready use. In fairness, my actual job is poking plugins all day to try to get them to do interesting things, so I end up with a lot of interesting things as the detritus of my workday.

tl;dr: there are no rules. If someone on a forum or in a Discord says you shouldn't do something in a DAW, all the more reason to do it. Throw a tempo-based buffer juggler after a granulator after a reverb. See what happens. There are no sound design cops. 

Chris Randall
Bellows Falls, VT
July, 2026