Cutoff filter

The world outside remained solid, remaining the anchor reassuring me there was nothing to worry about; as the colors of the room continued to fade and warp, however, I realized with a vague sort of alarm that the edges of the window were beginning increasingly to blur as well. What would happen as this continued? Would the edges of the panes fade to nothing? Would the windows expand along the walls as the room's coherency faded to nothing, or would the illegible singular blur the room was increasing toward expand to cover the gap to the still-sharp outside world? Or would the windowframe simply spread out into a thin, low-alpha membrane I would find myself unable to break through? I looked closer; the windows were still completely clear. I wondered if they were still glass. I decided not to touch them.

I considered the door; I considered making a break for it. I did not like the idea of entering into the blur (Would I pass through objects when I came into contact with their expanded, bloated borders? Or would I find them as substantial in this engorged state as they always were? Would they feel like pillows? Spines? Something totally other?). I liked even less the idea of entering further into the building, as opposed to the immediate escape to the outside the windows offered. I did not know if the blurring became worse toward the building's center; I did not know what I would find there. However, I could not bring myself to venture the risk of breaking a window; I supposed the others were still there around me, however blurry, and I found I could not totally discount the possibility I was the only one who could see what was happening. If so, I did not want to suffer the consequences of having broken a window and crawled out of it for what was, to everyone else, no apparent reason.

I considered the deep, intense shade of deep cyan blue I saw outside; I realized suddenly that blue was a color no longer represented at all within the room. The blur that comprised the inside contained a mixed wash of various sepias, but blue was not to be found among them. The one exception was a bottle of Aquafina that someone had left on the windowsill a few feet from where I was sitting; somehow, like the iPod beside it on the sill, it remained through all this as clear as I was, an outpost of the defined world outside. I wondered if this was a useful bit of information. I could not see the significance. Why blue?

No matter. I made my decision. I rose and gathered my bag, trying to look as composed and natural as possible given the circumstances on the offchance the others could still see, and headed for the door. I found my fears about touching the blur were unfounded; the blur shifted around me, the cloudy tendrils of the objects in the room shying away from me, myself the focus of the lens, myself the center of this dissolving little universe. The outside world was still totally clear through the misshapen holes that the windows had become behind me; the trees were waving in a sudden gust of wind. A group of six or seven dark birds rose toward the trees and landed in them.

I noticed the blurs shifting just behind me as I neared the door; someone within the room was still moving. I braced myself. The feel of the knob was strange, almost electric, and the now almost imperceptible shape of the door seemed to warp as it opened past me. I passed through. The corridor was now an almost totally homogenous mass of gray, broken only by thin smearing dark streaks running randomly down from above. They looked like running paint. Odd, I thought, if that is indeed what they are; the fading of everything else had followed an almost mathematical gaussian precision.

I tried to fix in my mind the image of what the corridor used to look like; I tried to fix as clearly as possible where the walls used to be. I traced a path through the image in my mind; four or five steps to my right, then a left turn, then ten or twelve feet to the door that led outside. My confidence faltered as I walked; without the clear, visible reassurance that the windows had offered, I was no longer confident the outside still existed. I stopped and stared at where the bar to open the door ought to be. It looked no different than the gray around it. I took a deep breath, wondering partway through if perhaps the air in here had become something I did not want to breathe too deeply. I discarded my worry. It did not matter. It does not matter.

I brace myself and push.

Cutoff is used to block certain frequencies from a sound. In a standard LP (Low Pass) cut/reso filter, cutoff determines the range of high frequencies to be cut. Resonance effect originates from an artifact in the original cutoff filter used in old hardware synthesizers. It is narrow band of frequencies, near the cutoff level, where the sound is amplified. Today this artifact can be easily avoided, but it is still available though, because it can be used as a special effect. Changes in the cutoff level together with high resonance produces interesting phaser-like effect, which is one of the reasons for the popularity of the TB-303 synthesizer.

-- flstudio.com