Terrain

Terrain is the instrument form of nn_terrain: a small Fourier-feature network maps a few continuous coordinates to a point in a neural-audio codec's latent space. Instead of sliding eight raw latent sliders, you move across a learned surface where nearby points sound related.

This is an explicit web prototype. The terrain evaluator is a pure, parity-checked TypeScript port of the trained network; the RAVE decode reuses the browser worker. The shipped fixture pairs a 4-D percussion terrain with the 8-D magnetic-resonator-piano (Strengjavera) decoder — a deliberate codec mismatch. Because RAVE's decoder is causal and expects encoded material, a raw terrain latent decodes to near-silence; so each take encodes a short seed clip and adds the terrain's XY offset to its latent trajectory. The terrain therefore steers the timbre of a resonator-piano seed rather than being decoded on its own — audible, and a legitimate proof of the terrain→decoder mechanism while a trained terrain/codec pair is sourced.