I would like a synthetic thunder sound but not sure ow to create.  I
found  René Nyffenegger's thunder orc but it seems to lack attack --
more distant thunder than a bolt from the blue (no pun intended).
Other than a recording how do I get this?

In a different context, a sharp percussive sound like a gunshot or a
firework?

Sorry to ask such basic sound-design questions.

==John ffitch

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There's a thunder example in Andy Farnell's book Designing Sound.
There used to be a tutorial based on the same material on his website
http://obiwannabe.co.uk/ but that site is down. This seems to be a
copy though: http://www.moz.ac.at/sem/lehre/lib/pd-sounddesign/tutorial_thunder.html

I spent a long time trying to make a good thunder sound a while back
and eventually came to the conclusion that the attack can be quite
simple (noise with a sharply decaying envelope) but the real
complexity lies in both the initial run up to the main thunder clap -
there are often some early pre-echoes before it which have a sweeping
high pass characteristic - and also the filtering and distribution in
time of the later echoes which seem to have varying lowpass responses
but also slight resonant peaks similar to a phasing effect.
Phaser/Flanger like effects seem to achieve a certain similarity to
this as if the acoustics involve a comb filtering between the ground
and the atmosphere.

I hope that's helpful. I was never really satisfied with anything I
could produce synthetically - I guess it's a very complex and not well
understood acoustic phenomenon despite it's familiarity.

Regards,
 Joel

On 30 July 2016 at 20:37, jpff  wrote:
> I would like a synthetic thunder sound but not sure ow to create.  I
> found  René Nyffenegger's thunder orc but it seems to lack attack --
> more distant thunder than a bolt from the blue (no pun intended).
> Other than a recording how do I get this?
>
> In a different context, a sharp percussive sound like a gunshot or a
> firework?
>
> Sorry to ask such basic sound-design questions.
>
> ==John ffitch
>
> Csound mailing list
> Csound@listserv.heanet.ie
> https://listserv.heanet.ie/cgi-bin/wa?A0=CSOUND
> Send bugs reports to
>         https://github.com/csound/csound/issues
> Discussions of bugs and features can be posted here

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I've had some luck making thunder effects in csound in the past using layers of grain opcodes with dense, extremely short fluctuating grain lengths mixed with layers of filtered pink noise. 

I remember the key was using exponential envelopes for the grains and then washing everything out with cavernous convolution reverb. 

> On Jul 30, 2016, at 2:27 PM, Joel Ross  wrote:
> 
> There's a thunder example in Andy Farnell's book Designing Sound.
> There used to be a tutorial based on the same material on his website
> http://obiwannabe.co.uk/ but that site is down. This seems to be a
> copy though: http://www.moz.ac.at/sem/lehre/lib/pd-sounddesign/tutorial_thunder.html
> 
> I spent a long time trying to make a good thunder sound a while back
> and eventually came to the conclusion that the attack can be quite
> simple (noise with a sharply decaying envelope) but the real
> complexity lies in both the initial run up to the main thunder clap -
> there are often some early pre-echoes before it which have a sweeping
> high pass characteristic - and also the filtering and distribution in
> time of the later echoes which seem to have varying lowpass responses
> but also slight resonant peaks similar to a phasing effect.
> Phaser/Flanger like effects seem to achieve a certain similarity to
> this as if the acoustics involve a comb filtering between the ground
> and the atmosphere.
> 
> I hope that's helpful. I was never really satisfied with anything I
> could produce synthetically - I guess it's a very complex and not well
> understood acoustic phenomenon despite it's familiarity.
> 
> Regards,
> Joel
> 
>> On 30 July 2016 at 20:37, jpff  wrote:
>> I would like a synthetic thunder sound but not sure ow to create.  I
>> found  René Nyffenegger's thunder orc but it seems to lack attack --
>> more distant thunder than a bolt from the blue (no pun intended).
>> Other than a recording how do I get this?
>> 
>> In a different context, a sharp percussive sound like a gunshot or a
>> firework?
>> 
>> Sorry to ask such basic sound-design questions.
>> 
>> ==John ffitch
>> 
>> Csound mailing list
>> Csound@listserv.heanet.ie
>> https://listserv.heanet.ie/cgi-bin/wa?A0=CSOUND
>> Send bugs reports to
>>        https://github.com/csound/csound/issues
>> Discussions of bugs and features can be posted here
> 
> Csound mailing list
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> Send bugs reports to
>        https://github.com/csound/csound/issues
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Regarding gunshots, I had decent luck getting gunshot sounds with an
instrument I originally wrote to emulate a snare drum. Using a simple
additive synth set-up, with a base frequency around 180hz and a stack of
oscillators set to enharmonic ratios of between ~1.5—~3.5 with the base,
mixed with filtered noise, you can get decent pistol sounds by varying
the base frequency, the ratios of the partials, the amount of noise, the
attack, etc. I found that if I gave it a very quick decay, shorter than
would be realistic for a snare drum, it took on more gunshotlike
character.

Excerpts from jpff's message of 2016-07-30 20:37:51 +0100:
> I would like a synthetic thunder sound but not sure ow to create.  I
> found  Ren�� Nyffenegger's thunder orc but it seems to lack attack --
> more distant thunder than a bolt from the blue (no pun intended).
> Other than a recording how do I get this?
> 
> In a different context, a sharp percussive sound like a gunshot or a
> firework?
> 
> Sorry to ask such basic sound-design questions.
> 
> ==John ffitch
> 
> Csound mailing list
> Csound@listserv.heanet.ie
> https://listserv.heanet.ie/cgi-bin/wa?A0=CSOUND
> Send bugs reports to
>         https://github.com/csound/csound/issues
> Discussions of bugs and features can be posted here

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Thanks will take a look.  I have a thunder made from white noise and sweeping LP filter which is OK.  Need to get the reverb better now.

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