Overview
FALSE MEMORY is a real-time audio disintegration effect. Feed it any sound and watch it decay. A tape left in the sun. A corrupted file half-recovered from a dead drive. A memory dissolving as you try to hold onto it.
Turn up MEMORY and the destruction begins. Everything else shapes how the sound falls apart.
Core Controls
| Control | Description |
|---|
| MEMORY | Master intensity. At 0, audio passes clean. As MEMORY rises, all destruction modules progressively engage. This is the single most important control. |
Character
The CHARACTER section determines the flavor of destruction.
| Control | Description |
|---|
| ANALOG / DIGITAL | Crossfades between two parallel destruction paths. Slide left for warm, organic decay. Slide right for cold, precise corruption. At 0.5 you hear equal parts of both. |
Analog Types
| Type | Character |
|---|
| Cassette | Warm, muffled. Gentle wow, frequent soft crackle. Soft tanh saturation. |
| Reel | Clean to harsh. Subtle HF rolloff, rare loud pops. Hard-knee saturation at high intensity. |
| VHS | Chaotic. Deep pitch wobble, crunchy asymmetric saturation, tracking artifacts. |
Digital Types
| Type | Character |
|---|
| Lo-fi | Gentle degradation. Light downsampling, 8-16 bit quantization, occasional stutters. |
| Circuit | Aggressive. Rapid micro-glitches (5-50ms), heavy downsampling with clock jitter. |
| Data-mosh | Long frozen loops (150-800ms). Moderate crush, stuck buffer repeats. |
Degradation
| Control | Description |
|---|
| DAMAGE | Controls oxide damage spread on a 4-second ring buffer. Higher values mean wider probability of dropout and more crackle from accumulated tape damage. Damage accumulates across loops, creating evolving weak spots. |
| DRIFT | Independent pitch variation control. At low values, subtle pitch breathing. Higher values create untethered pitch wandering up to ±500 cents. This is separate from the periodic wow/flutter tied to MEMORY and the analog types (Cassette/Reel/VHS). DRIFT applies to the full output signal regardless of CHARACTER position. Also adds sample-clock jitter to the digital path. |
Atmosphere
| Control | Description |
|---|
| FOG | Smears the frequency spectrum into clouds using a 2048-point FFT spectral freeze. At 0, the signal is clear. At 1, it becomes a shimmering spectral wash. |
| GHOSTS | Lets past audio bleed through the current signal. Reads from a 3-second history buffer. Lookback depth scales with MEMORY (100ms to 3s). |
Fog Types
| Type | Character |
|---|
| Tonal | Slow freeze preserving harmonic structure. |
| Inharmonic | Fast smear destroying harmonic relationships. |
| Evolving | Deep freeze with 3 independent sweeping filter bands that slowly morph. |
Ghost Types
| Type | Character |
|---|
| Echoes | Single delayed copy detuned by -2 cents. Rhythmic repetition. |
| Imprints | Lowpass-smeared residue. Resonant harmonic traces. |
| Granular | 8-voice grain pool. Random 20-80ms grains with cosine windows scattered across time. |
Texture
| Control | Description |
|---|
| HISS | Tape noise floor level. Pink noise character varies by analog type. Weighted by oxide damage at each sample position. |
| CRACKLE | Sparse impulse crackle via Poisson process. Frequency and character varies by analog type. Concentrated at damaged oxide positions. |
Evolve
| Control | Description |
|---|
| EVOLVE | Auto-ramp that deepens destruction over time. Pick a duration from 1 to 64 minutes. Walk away. Come back to something completely different. |
When Evolve is active, it continuously pushes MEMORY, DAMAGE, FOG, and GHOSTS toward maximum over the selected duration. These four sliders will resist manual adjustment while Evolve is running. To regain manual control, turn Evolve off first. The other controls (Drift, Character, Hiss, Crackle, Mix) are not affected by Evolve and can be adjusted freely at any time.
Randomize
The RANDOMIZE button rerolls all destruction parameters instantly (except MIX, HISS, and CRACKLE). Hit it until something clicks.
Output
| Control | Description |
|---|
| MIX | Dry/wet blend. At 0, only the original signal. At 1, fully processed. Applied as the very last stage before output. |
Signal Flow
Input → Dry Buffer Capture
↓
├─ Analog Path: HF Loss → Saturation → Wow/Flutter → Noise Floor
│ (type: Cassette / Reel / VHS)
│
├─ Digital Path: Bitcrusher → Buffer Repeat → Reconstruction LPF
│ (type: Lo-fi / Circuit / Data-mosh)
│
└─ CHARACTER crossfade (Analog ← → Digital)
↓
Drift (pitch walk) → Oxide Dropout
↓
Semantic Path: Spectral Blur (FOG) → Ghosts
↓
MIX (dry/wet) → Output
Formats
- AUv3 (iOS) — runs inside AUM, GarageBand, Logic, or any AUv3 host. Multiple instances supported.
- Standalone — runs as its own iOS app with built-in audio routing. iPhone and iPad.
- VST3 + AU + CLAP (Mac) — universal binary, Apple Silicon and Intel.
- VST3 + CLAP (Windows) — 64-bit.
Requires: iOS 16.0+ or macOS 11+ or Windows 10+.
