A prism for sound. The input is split into its harmonics the way glass splits light into colours, and each colour gets a fader: unity passes the harmonic exactly as heard, zero subtracts it, and pushing above unity grows it - including harmonics the source never had. An added harmonic rides the fundamental's own envelope, so it blooms and dies with the note instead of droning over it. Feed it a voice, a bass line, or a Wave.
Parameters
| Mode | Refract rebuilds the sound one partial at a time (true additive resynthesis over a pitch tracker) - this is the engine that can add harmonics and disperse them, and it wants pitched, one-note-at-a-time material. Filter is a harmonic EQ on the spectrum itself: it handles chords, drums and noise, stereo intact, but can only reshape the harmonics that are already there. |
| H1..H16 | the fader per harmonic, 0 to 2 with unity in the middle. |
| Disperse | Refract only: stretches the spacing between partials, so harmonic k moves beyond k times the fundamental. Positive values slide the sound toward bells and metal; a touch of negative pulls the stack into a tighter cluster. No EQ can do this - the partials are being re-struck, not filtered. |
| Residual | Filter only: the gain of everything between the harmonics. At 0 a sound is purified down to its tone; with the faders at 0 and Residual up, the tone is removed and the breath, bow noise and room remain. |
| Mix | dry/wet. The dry path is delayed to match, so any blend stays phase-coherent. |
| Level | output level of the refracted signal. |
Signal flow
Input -> pitch tracker -> split (heterodyne bank or STFT) -> faders -> recombine -> Mix with the delayed dry -> Output. The editor's readout shows the note the prism is locked onto, named in the patch's Tuning.
Notes
Both modes carry the same small delay, and the patch compensates for it. Refract's output is the oscillator bank alone, in mono: when the tracker hears nothing pitched, the bank fades to silence rather than chasing noise. Switch to Filter for material without one clear pitch.