Smooth

Parameters

Sigma — Standard deviation of the Gaussian blur, 0.5–10. Controls how aggressively adjacent spectral bins are averaged together. Low values (0.5–1.5) gentle softening — useful for taming harshness without losing definition. Mid (2–4) clear smoothing effect — sustained tones blur into each other, transients soften. High (5–10) heavy blur — content smears into a wash of frequencies. Pair with kernel for the trade-off between effect width and smoothness.

Additional controls

Kernel — Convolution kernel size, 3–15 (odd values only — even values get bumped up by one). Sets how many neighboring bins participate in each smoothing operation. Smaller kernels (3, 5) are fast and produce localized smoothing; larger kernels (11, 15) blend more bins together for broader, more dramatic blur. Larger kernels need more CPU but produce a smoother, less “windowed” character. 5–7 is a balanced default.

Phase — How phase is reconstructed after smoothing:

• Preserve — keep original phase (recommended default).
• Blend — interpolate phases.
• Dominant — use loudest bin’s phase.
• Complex — smooth phase as part of the complex spectrum.

For tonal material, Preserve is safest. For sound-design experimentation, try Complex to get more dramatic blur effects (with potential phasing artifacts).

About Smooth

Smooth applies a Gaussian blur to the spectral magnitude — the inverse operation of Sharpen. In the spectral domain this softens frequency edges, blending adjacent bins together. The result is reduced spectral contrast: harsh resonances soften, transients lose definition, sustained content takes on a hazier character. Use Smooth to: tame fizz on bright sources, soften noisy/clicky digital sources, create dreamy/diffuse textures, or pre-process material before granular processing (smoother grains). The visual analogy holds: smoothing softens spectral edges just as Gaussian blur softens pixel edges. Strong settings approach the “frozen frame” character of long-window time stretching, but here it’s frequency-axis blurring rather than time-axis smearing.

Generated 2026-05-05 from K2K_Dev@96730bdc by scripts/gen_lexique.py. Edit _intros/ or _overrides/, not this file.