Imaginary worlds and the Procedural Sound Lab

Imaginary worlds

The Worlds tab (key 4) holds eleven ready scenes, from Rainy study room and Submarine to Medieval tavern, Rainforest outpost, Cavern drips and Arctic night wind. Each card shows a badge:

• Generated — only synthesized layers, no recordings at all,
• Composite — real recordings mixed with generated sound,
• Authentic — only real recordings.

The card lists every layer; recordings appear with their title and licence. Press Open this world to load it into the Studio. Opening a world never starts playback, and your previous scene stays under File → Recent projects….

Some worlds only suggest a place. The café and the tavern use murmur-like bands of filtered noise that swell like a crowd — they are not recordings of people, and the world description says so.

Recordings in worlds are real Wikimedia Commons files with their real titles, authors and licences — for example the rufous-bellied thrush and the Pacific pygmy owl in Rainforest outpost. Their credits are listed under Credits… in the Studio.

The Procedural Sound Lab

The Lab tab (key 3) is for one generator at a time.

1. Choose a Generator type: Environment sound (rain, wind, stream, fire, hum and room tone, drone) or Noise colour (white, pink, brown, blue, violet).
2. Choose the Sound or the Noise colour.
3. Move the sliders. After each change the Lab renders a 10-second seamless loop.
4. Press Listen to hear the loop; Stop listening ends it.

The right side shows Spectrum and levels: a frequency chart, Level (RMS), Peak, Crest factor, Spectral centroid, 85% roll-off and the Slope (100 Hz – 10 kHz) in dB per octave. Pink noise falls by about 3 dB per octave and brown noise by about 6 dB; white noise is flat. A hum shows clear peaks at its harmonics, rain and wind are noise-like.

Seed (same seed = same sound) makes the loop repeatable; New variation picks another seed.

Take a sound further

• Add to scene adds the generator with exactly these settings as a layer in the Studio. In the Studio, Open in the Sound Lab on a generated layer works the other way round.
• Download WAV loop saves the 10-second loop.
• Same file with the API or MCP shows the input for the standalone tool (for example soundscape-ambience-generator). Sending that input to the tool returns the same WAV file, byte for byte — the Lab and the tool share one audio engine.
• Open the standalone tool opens the tool page on usefulweb.site.