The vortex beckons you. With trembling fingers, you ever so gently turn the mysterious knob within. Gently, at first, the engine stirs and the arcane beast within awakens. Your pulse quickens. It wants more. As you turn the knob further, a chilling draft fills the room. The tone swells. You attempt to appease it with the other controls, but its cries merely evolve into something new, equally terrifying and beautiful. A tear rolls down your cheek. The prophecy is fulfilled.
“Feed Me” is an idea born of a simple acoustic feedback simulation I implemented many years ago to imprecisely simulate the sound of a distorted guitar amplifier feeding back by vibrating the guitar strings over an air gap. The core of the algorithm is a simple resonant delay line ala Karplus-Strong, seeded with a very small amount of noise and fed through a soft-clip distortion and additional longer delay (”body”) before being fed back into the resonant delay line. The attenuation level and outer delay time determine which harmonics become dominant. The addition of a reverb and lowpass/highpass filters in the outer feedback loop provides additional color and tone shaping, and a final tape-style delay effect allows for sound-on-sound looping to further develop the soundscape.
