# Clock tick countdown

Six small ticks create a pause before a decision.

Source checkpoint: 8dc3dd143f8eb56223e62d40c694689330a94853. Original procedural synthesis by Renaissance Solutions with Codex.
Local review candidate: public distribution and reuse terms have not yet been selected.
Numbered audio, source and presets are preserved unchanged. Listening preferences and use under narration remain pending.

## Make it with your AI assistant

Ask whether your assistant can run Python and return WAV files. Give it this complete folder (or upload this ZIP and ask it to extract the files).
No account keys or Python packages are needed by the recipe. Use the supplied generator to reproduce our takes.
A prompt alone can lead to a different implementation.

Make an original clock-like countdown for a podcast quiz.
Create six short, dry ticks with a small alternating tick/tock pitch
difference and a light mechanical click. Keep the perspective close
and the stereo width narrow. Do not add an alarm or a special last note.
Use a 3.5-second file. Start at 0.12 seconds and space the six tick
starts 0.55 seconds apart, leaving silence after the final decay.

Use Python's standard library and original synthesis only. Save separate
layers, a 48 kHz / 24-bit stereo master, a mono fold-down, and a 16-bit
stereo WAV preview. Leave 6 dB of sample-peak headroom. Save the source,
a JSON preset with a fixed seed, a manifest, and SHA-256 checksums.

If you can run the code, render and verify the files. Otherwise return
complete code and local commands, and say what remains unexecuted.
Preserve the first take as v001 so a later experiment cannot overwrite it.

## Run locally

Unzip the complete kit and open Terminal in the folder containing this README, effects/, scripts/ and library/.
Python 3.10 or later is required; reference bytes were generated with Python 3.14.3 on macOS.
Run the following commands from that folder. Use a fresh output folder for every attempt; existing takes will not be overwritten.

python3 effects/009-clock-countdown/src/render.py --preset effects/009-clock-countdown/presets/v001.json --output tmp/009-clock-countdown-v001

python3 effects/009-clock-countdown/src/render.py --preset effects/009-clock-countdown/presets/v002.json --output tmp/009-clock-countdown-v002

Open each new preview.wav in an audio player. stereo.wav is the 48 kHz/24-bit master, mono.wav is its mono fold-down, and stems/ contains aligned layers.
Check the retained files and reproduce all WAVs with:

python3 scripts/verify_library.py --reproduce

Byte equality is verified in the recorded runtime; check other runtimes. This command does not judge how a sound feels.

## What we did

1. Make each tick from a damped tone and noise click.
2. Alternate the body pitch slightly.
3. Place six ticks at regular intervals.

## Change one thing

Keep v001 unchanged. Copy its preset to v002 and change only
tick_spacing_seconds from 0.55 to 0.38, plus the take label. Keep all
six ticks, their body and click settings, individual noise seeds,
pan, file duration, and -6 dBFS peak target. Do not add a final alarm.
Render both takes and report event timing and level changes. Leave
the choice open until both have been tried against the quiz narration.

Use the supplied source for these parameter names. With newly written code, first identify the equivalent control.
Six ticks remain; their spacing changes from 0.55 to 0.38 seconds. Individual tick shapes and final mix gain stay the same.
Both mixes share a sample-peak target; that does not mean they seem equally loud.

## Listen and decide

Does faster spacing add useful anticipation, or hurry the listener?
Try the ticks beneath a quiz pause. Give the listener time to think. Compare both takes and the passage without the effect.
Record what you heard, your preference (including neither or undecided), and one next change.
Technical checks passed for the reference files; human listening and use in context remain pending.

## Source identity

The original chapter SHA-256 is 5a22fbde6ca78cef5b65043dda63e2da77eeef41651505d84ffb16631bceeb06.
Each library manifest records source, preset, dependencies and WAV hashes.
The included catalog is the matching single-recipe subset of the pinned Studio catalog.