procedural audio

A binaural audio demo, the 'Virtual Barber Shop', that places a barber moving around your head. It works best with headphones and closed eyes.

GDC 2019 session where Insomniac's David Santiago describes the procedural systems used to build Manhattan for Marvel's Spider-Man. It covers the open-world pipeline and how each system was designed to support iteration and dependencies.

A Google I/O 2013 talk by Android audio engineers on why reliable, low-latency audio is hard on the platform. It covers problem areas across the stack, platform work underway and techniques apps can use.

David Rosen of Wolfire Games explains how simple procedural techniques can produce fluid, interactive character animation from very few keyframes. Examples come from Overgrowth, Receiver and Black Shades, from his 2014 GDC session.

Ubisoft procedural technical artist Etienne Carrier explains the Houdini-based tools used to build Far Cry 5's roughly 100 square km open world. It covers generating biomes, texturing terrain, freshwater networks, cliff rocks and vegetation placement.

Timur Doumler's CppCon 2015 talk on how C++ is used in the audio industry. It covers the patterns and tools audio developers rely on, including handling real-time constraints.

Herbert Wolverson's Roguelike Celebration 2020 talk surveying procedural map generation techniques, including integration of hand-crafted prefabs and vaults.

Monty Montgomery of Xiph.org gives real-time demonstrations of sampling, quantization, bit depth and dither using real audio equipment, including both digital analysis tools and vintage analog bench gear. It shows that sampled audio is not stair-stepped and corrects common misconceptions about digital audio.

AngeTheGreat describes building a physically realistic internal combustion engine simulator in C++, drawing on fluid dynamics, physics and chemistry. It generates procedural audio for engines such as a V8.

Techmoan demonstrates the Tefifon, a vintage German audio player that combines elements of record and tape with a grooved elastic loop. He shows how it works and plays it.

Smarter Every Day shares a binaural audio recording of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch made by Trevor Mahlmann, with explanations of the sounds including the sonic booms of the landing boosters. It is meant to be heard with headphones.

Kevlin Henney argues that procedural programming never went away despite later paradigms such as OO and functional. He traces the history of structured programming and shows where procedural thinking still lives in modern code and why it matters for readability.

Adobe's VoCo demo from the MAX 2016 Sneak Peeks, co-hosted by Jordan Peele, showing software that changes words in a voiceover by typing new ones.

A remastered recording of Will Wright's 2005 GDC talk revealing Spore, titled The Future of Content. He covers procedurally generated content and the ambitions of the game, with gameplay demo starting around 12:30.

Inigo Quilez live-paints a mountain landscape using only math in a shader, building up from a basic polynomial noise surface through fractal terrain, lighting and atmosphere. The code runs in real time on Shadertoy so viewers can edit it as they follow along.

A Justin Bieber song slowed down 800% with the PaulStretch program, turning a pop track into a long ambient drone.

A BBC Horizon clip demonstrating the McGurk effect, where the same audio sounds like different syllables depending on the mouth movements you see. It shows that people integrate visual speech information into what they hear.

Tom Scott explains why hold music sounds worse than it used to, tracing it to old telephone exchanges and the audio compression applied by modern switches. It is a short visit to the Milton Keynes Museum.

GoldenSound publishes music on Tidal to test MQA, a deep dive into the format's claims and problems including its leaky filter. Testing begins around the 5:45 mark.

A roughly one-minute TV clip in which a guest accidentally breaks a rare, one-of-a-kind wax cylinder recording on camera.

A two-minute sine tone sweeping exponentially from 20 Hz to 20 kHz, covering the human hearing range at constant acoustic pressure.

Elevated is a 4 kilobyte PC demo by RGBA and TBC from Breakpoint 2009. It fly-throughs a realistic procedurally generated landscape with synthesized music and post-processing, all from a tiny executable.

Techmoan's beginner introduction to the compact cassette, testing metal tapes and Dolby S noise reduction on a Sony TC-S1 deck. He checks whether a cassette can sound close to a CD when good tape and equipment are used.

Full gameplay of .kkrieger, a first-person shooter by Farbrausch that fits into a 96KB executable by generating its textures, models and sounds procedurally.

Musician and audio engineer Benn Jordan tries Dolby Atmos as a consumer, covering the theory of immersive audio, its business model, and home theater and headphone listening. He concludes it often falls short of the pitch.

The official audio of Leonard Cohen's 'Everybody Knows' from the album I'm Your Man.

Gil Scott-Heron's 1970 spoken-word piece, in an official audio upload. It contrasts the Apollo moon program with poverty and neglect at home.

A 12-minute film in which Erlang's creators demonstrate the language's fault tolerance and live-system features, including phoning each other to show it working. This version has fixed audio.

Musician Benn Jordan explains and demonstrates adversarial noise that poison-pills music files against AI training and scraping.

Dan Worrall explains when higher sample rates help in recording and mixing, and when they do not. He goes into oversampling versus higher sample rates, and aliasing in distortion plugins.

A 2006 promotional video for sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!, a music software project that analyzes and reassembles sampled audio and video in real time, tied to themes of sampling and copyright.

A short clip of Venetian Snares' track 'Look' from Songs About My Cats (2001), shown as a spectrogram. The audio encodes an image in its frequency content.

Allieway Audio gives an informal introduction and live-coding demo of ORCA, a free esoteric programming environment for building procedural sequencers from Hundred Rabbits. It walks through the interface and how to make music with it.

Elevated by Rgba and TBC, the winner of the 4k intro compo at Breakpoint 2009. It is a realtime procedurally generated 3D flythrough with music, all in a 4096-byte executable.

Inigo Quilez live-codes a cartoon character painting entirely from math, using signed distance fields in a Shadertoy shader. He explains each step of building the image from formulas.

Brian Will makes the case for procedural programming over object-oriented programming, arguing that OOP's promised encapsulation and decoupling are largely illusory. He analyzes real code examples and the problems of tying data to behavior in classes.

Dan Olson of Folding Ideas investigates the Mikkelsen Twins and the ghostwritten-audiobook passive-income course industry, even playing along with the scheme. It is a long video essay on get-rich-quick publishing grifts.

Dean Friedman's near-hour-long introduction to synthesis, covering the building blocks of sound and the controls on a synthesizer. He slowly adjusts knobs so viewers hear what each parameter does.

A clip from the 2011 film Margin Call in which senior partners hold an emergency meeting and decide to sell off toxic assets immediately. It is set at the start of the 2008 financial crisis.

Oskar Stalberg explains how Wave Function Collapse assembles island dioramas from handcrafted tilesets in Bad North. He covers the theory, implementation, tooling, and how he blends art and technology.