How Geonkick Applies the Pitch Envelope

22-12-2023

Here, we aim to clarify how Geonkick actually applies an envelope to the oscillator pitch or filter cutoff frequency. When the user switches to these envelopes, the scale on the frequency axis becomes logarithmic. If we were to work with a linear scale, it would be difficult to access the lower frequencies. When the user draws a line in the these envelopes, for example, from (0ms, 1000Hz) to (800ms, 20Hz), the user might think that the sweep will be linear too. However, because Geonkick uses a logarithmic scale, the line is applied logarithmically too.

For a sweep like this:

if we draw the spectrum of frequency density over time, a line will also be present:

In contrast, a linear sweep looks like this:

It's worth noting that our hearing is a non-linear system, i.e., it is logarithmic as well.

Linear application is not available in the new version of Geonkick due to an inconsistency between what the user sees in the graph and what is applied. However, maybe in the future, the linear option will be added along with the current logarithmic one.