Desense

About Desense

Desense plays the sound of a handset bleeding into nearby gear: the buzz, stutter and whine a phone puts into an amplifier while it talks to its tower. It grew out of the interference Morpheral Machines' wavetable synth The Swarm makes in demo mode. The key sets the pitch; up to 8 notes play at once, each with its own random stutter, or one at a time in Mono with glide.

Every note runs a pulse train, a transmission gate, a carrier tone and a band filter, and four modes reshape those with the same knobs. GSM bursts at a handset's TDMA rate with a carrier that follows the melody; Mains models ground-loop hum from rectified power; Data hops between four FSK tones like a modem; Radio beats a heterodyne whistle that fades with rising static. Two switches snap the gate to the host tempo and lock its pattern to a seed.

A sidechain input lets outside audio, a voice, a drum loop or a pad, carry the interference instead of or alongside Desense's own pulses and carrier tone, shaped differently by each mode: chopped into bursts, rectified like hum, or ring-modulated by the carrier.