# Three wooden knocks

Three close impacts suggest someone just outside the scene.

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.

Create three original wooden knocks for someone arriving at a door in a
podcast. Make the knocks dry, close, short, and slightly unequal in
strength. Use a gentle contact followed by irregular, rapidly damped
body resonances. Avoid a long bell-like ring or a sharp snare-like burst.

Use Python's standard library only. Do not use a recording, stock sample,
voice, or paid audio service. Place the three hits at 0.25, 0.63, and
1.09 seconds in a 1.65-second file. Keep room sound out of the master.

Save separate aligned body and contact stems, a 48 kHz/24-bit stereo
master and mono fold-down, and a 16-bit stereo preview. Leave -6 dBFS
stereo sample-peak headroom. Preserve code, seed, complete settings,
commands, versions, measurements, and hashes as v001.

Generate the files if you have execution tools. Otherwise provide full
local steps and say that generation remains pending. Do not claim the
knocks sound like wood or work in the scene until someone listens.

## 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/011-wooden-knocks/src/render.py --preset effects/011-wooden-knocks/presets/v001.json --output tmp/011-wooden-knocks-v001

python3 effects/011-wooden-knocks/src/render.py --preset effects/011-wooden-knocks/presets/v002.json --output tmp/011-wooden-knocks-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 a resonant body and a separate contact tick.
2. Place impacts at 0.250, 0.630 and 1.090 seconds.
3. Keep the rhythm fixed while changing body decay.

## Change one thing

Keep v001. Create v002 by changing only damping_per_second from 80 to
120 and the take label. Keep the same source, seed, body frequencies,
contact noise, hit times and strengths, panning, duration, and peak target.
Render a separate take. Compare full mixes and isolated body stems.
Measure late body energy as well as overall RMS, and explain the shared
gain adjustment. Leave the material and preference judgments pending.

Use the supplied source for these parameter names. With newly written code, first identify the equivalent control.
Damping rises from 80 to 120 per second. The later body contains less energy; all three start times stay fixed.
Both mixes share a sample-peak target; that does not mean they seem equally loud.

## Listen and decide

Does faster damping suggest the right door, or remove too much weight?
Put the knocks before a character reacts. Decide what kind of door each take suggests. 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 a2d9b9c52f2dd6c627dddc77c002ccb1558c92a7600292181cb4667becb14171.
Each library manifest records source, preset, dependencies and WAV hashes.
The included catalog is the matching single-recipe subset of the pinned Studio catalog.