iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

After blending these layers together, the final touch is the "instability" setting, which is just a gentle random detuning of the sawtooth layer — I feel that this bit makes a huge difference in terms of making it sound less mechanically perfect, and a bit more wild and roaring.

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Then I take the output of that and use it to modulate the amplitude of a noise generator, which gives a nice chuffy sound when idling. The final layer is a simple sawtooth, which I run through an LPF to make it less clicky.

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Here's what the wavetable sounds like just by itself, then again with a bit of tube-style asymmetric distortion applied for extra grunt.

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I started by drawing in a simple two-frame wavetable. These shapes are meant to mimic the explosions in an engine — thin peaks for low RPMs and wider ones for high RPMs, the theory being that the duration of these peaks should sound very similar even as the duration of the whole cycle gets shorter

A wavetable that is pointy on the first frame and blobby on the last frame

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Zander Hulme ~♪ @zander.supertonic.au · 07/07/2026

If you've wondered how we recorded the engine for the Rhino Beetle in Isopod, we actually didn't record anything! It's entirely synthesised at runtime using wavetables in Unreal MetaSounds. A very quick explanation thread 👇 #gameaudio #unreal #metasounds #synthesis #sounddesign #isopod

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Love to live in a time where I can get wrong answers very quickly. I have Duck Duck Go's AI stuff turned off, but I guess that doesn't apply to the in-address-bar version?

Duck Duck Go showing a currency conversion of ¥6,270 to $1,339.09 AUD, which is very, very wrong

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Zander Hulme ~♪ @zander.supertonic.au · 30/06/2026

Oscilloscope art feels like a good fit for an audio business because it's a rare case of seeing what you hear. An oscilloscope is a piece of equipment that lets you see an electrical waveform, but by sending it very particular signals you can use it to draw vector images

An oscilloscope screen showing a sine wave (from Wikipedia)

An oscilloscope displaying a picture of a clock in XY mode (from Wikipedia)

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Zander Hulme ~♪ @zander.supertonic.au · 30/06/2026

We've been doing a bit of #SonicBranding work lately, and you know who doesn't have a #SonicLogo? Supertonic! It's hard to settle on just one sound to represent a business that's all about sound, so I thought I might make a few different ones. Here's number 1: oscilloscope art 📡

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Zander Hulme ~♪ @zander.supertonic.au · 27/06/2026

Decent turnout at QGF today! I wasn't there long but I had some great chats with people I haven't seen in yonks, really good time-to-great-chats ratio ❤️✨

An overhead view of the show floor at Queensland Games Fest

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Zander Hulme ~♪ @zander.supertonic.au · 26/06/2026

Sorry, that's stingy of me to talk about flamethrower sounds and just show a picture! Here's the MetaSounds generating the flamethrower sound — you may recognise the stripes on the spectrograph output from the earlier example, though this time it is more subtle.

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Plus we can use it to dynamically simulate everyday sounds like distant aeroplanes or exploding fireballs. For example, I synthesised jetpacks and flamethrowers for Isopod with pretty much nothing but white noise generators and comb filters, and I think they turned out pretty good!

A still from the game Ispod by Sbug games showing the flamethrower attack of the Rhino Beetle boss

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This is because you are hearing both the direct version of a sound and its reflection off another surface at the same time. The extra time it takes the reflection to travel through the air means the reflected sound arrives at your ear later than the direct sound.

A diagram showing sound reflecting off a wall, taking a longer path than the direct signal

Oh no, that gif didn't animate 🫠 Basically: same plus same = twice as loud, same plus opposite = silent. Any offset between these values gives an outcome somewhere in the middle

Two in-phase waves creating a bigger wave

Two out-of-phase waves cancelling-out to make silence

When you overlay two copies of the same simple sine wave, depending on the offset, the peaks will either line up (making it louder) or they will cancel out (making it quieter or silent)

When I showed this at QGF, we ran into tech issues and the video was silent 😳 So I had to try to make these sounds with my mouth 😅

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Comb filtering is pattern of constructive and destructive phase interference between time-displaced versions of an identical audio signal, forming equally-spaced “teeth” in the frequency domain. Basically it is the resulting effect of a very short echo. I'll give an example next 😅

Zander Hulme ~♪ @zander.supertonic.au · 23/06/2026

It's Queensland Games Fest again this weekend! I'm not doing the Lightning Talks this year, but I thought I might share a bit of my talk from last year

Title card, it says "comb filtering in 5 minutes or less with Zander Hulme" on an image of a spectrograph of a comb filter sweep

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Little sneak peek of something... <.< I don't think I'll ever get sick of bouncing stuff to tape

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Zander Hulme ~♪ @zander.supertonic.au · 08/05/2026

Gitlab out here asking me to embark on the Hero's Journey or some shit

Menu option that says "Start an Ultimate trial"

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Zander Hulme ~♪ @zander.supertonic.au · 04/05/2026

Yeah me too 01-Drums-MIDI, me too...

A bit of MIDI data that looks like a face with a vacant expression

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Zander Hulme ~♪ @zander.supertonic.au · 21/04/2026

On the one hand I don't want to pick up too much of other people's crap during kerbside, but on the other hand this is so funny to me

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Zander Hulme ~♪ @zander.supertonic.au · 10/04/2026

Is there a word for a thing that is both beautiful and disgusting at once? This telegraph pole covered in wads of spent gum at the foot of Lombard St was much more captivating to me than the wiggly street. If I don't think about it, it's quite aesthetically pleasing. If I do, it's gross as heck

A telegraph pole covered in wads of chewing gum

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Zander Hulme ~♪ @zander.supertonic.au · 25/03/2026

Sorry, getting off my soapbox. Uhhh hey check out this neat spectrograph of a sound I made recently!

A spectrograph that looks a little like purple grass on a black background

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Zander Hulme ~♪ @zander.supertonic.au · 14/03/2026

It was my last day of working the @fmodstudio.bsky.social GDC booth today! Had a lovely visit from @visager.bsky.social too! Lots of great chats this week, I'm so happy that I got to nerd-out over audio stuff with cool people all day (and some of the nights, too) ❤️

Josie and Zander in front of the FMOD booth

Cozy Caravan and its FMOD project showing at the booth

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Zander Hulme ~♪ @zander.supertonic.au · 08/03/2026

So cool that they made that sculpture from THPS4 in real life

Famous San Francisco sculpture that I don't know the name of

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Zander Hulme ~♪ @zander.supertonic.au · 24/02/2026

Feature request/beg for @kilohearts.com — please make the search bar capture text input automatically when you click to add a new effect. The number of times that I have clicked, started typing, and accidentally fired off a bunch of Reaper shortcuts in a row is frankly embarrassing

The search box that appears when you click to add an effect in a Kilohearts plugin

Zander Hulme ~♪ @zander.supertonic.au · 12/02/2026

Hey outlet, did you see who switched off my charger last night? Outlet?

A power outlet where the red "on" indicators are offset, like they're looking to the side, guiltily