First there was nothing. Not even nothing. So NOTHING! was first, just after nothing.

Then there were men. There were women as well, but for the sake of simplicity there were men, meaning women as well.

Among men there was dg - with a need for sound. In fact, dg was more than men were - they were mighty wizards, but men didn't know yet.

/radar: Gimme the sound!

And /radar was not alone. But there was no medium for the sound to float.

Schubi: Let's call it soundium - the place where sound and people meet.

And so the soundium was born.

There was still no sound in the soundium and the people were waiting and listening.

DEC: Gimme the beat!

Shortly after,

/radar: Gimme the bass!

So first came the beat to please DEC. Everybody liked the beat even if there was nothing to hear yet. The beat came to everybody who wanted it - in the form of the beat string.

/radar: But hell, where is this damn bass?

So the lord of bass gave the soundium all the bass it wanted. A lot of it. In various tasty and colorful shapes.

/radar: Cool, but this bass should burst my ears and I wanna feel it down in my stomach!

Since the beat was for everybody who wanted it - it came to the bass that wanted it bad. To the bass in the powerful form of the soundlet. And as the soundlet appeared in the soundium, men heard and felt the bass. The bass in the middle among men.

Micha: Bass is nice and music is even nicer - the soundlets shall multiply!

A lot of other soundlets joined the beat string. As they were joining and leaving, the soundium was filled with sound.

So nice the sound was - to really move the soundium there was need for more. More to do about sound. More to do about space. More to do about men in the soundium. And more work for dg. So effectlets came to help.

Rezi: But how the hell does it work, what are all this nice circles and boxes and lines and anyway?

Carl: Doesn't matter - let's go to this party!

We remember - there were the soundium, soundlets, effectlets and not the faintest idea how they work together to bring the bass, the sound and the music to men. So there was a lot to explain. First of all there was the soundium - the place where sound and men meet. The soundium is filled with sound coming from the soundium-fill-o-matic which blows away the speakers on behalf of racks of power amps. But the analog world is of little interest to the dg team. Their destiny is to bring the soundium-fill-o-matic to men. And that is the way the soundium-fill-o-matic works: The soundium-fill-o-matic is mainly a matrix. It's first column are the soundlets:

Soundlets are loud and strong so they have to be tamed first before meeting the soundium. Effectlets will to that. So the matrix gets populated with columns of effectlets.

And finally all this meets in the soundium.

/radar: That's all nice but how all this gets calculated?

To get the most out of today's architectures the soundium-fill-o-matic will take a data parallel approach (SEMD - Single Effectlet Multiple Data). This means that soundlets produce a vector of frames, each frame holding a predefined number of samples. This vector will then be processed by the effectlet matrix until it finally ends up in the soundium.

/radar: Well, well, well and what about time?

For that let's have a closer look at a soundlet.

The soundlet is a function in time (a), often represented as a table (a wave file in the M-word speak). The time argument of this function is is indicated by the now arrow (d). The function is placed relative to the beat (e) in the beat ring (c). The beat ring consists of beat frames (b) that are synchronized with the beat.