SkyHowl starts from an awkward fact: wind is silent.
Air in motion radiates essentially nothing on its own. Everything a listener calls wind is the flow meeting something — a hillside, a wire, a bare twig, a leaf, the edge of a gap.
So SkyHowl is built in two halves: a flow field that makes no sound at all, and the sources that flow drives. It is why a gust in this plugin owns no filter and no noise source of its own. A gust is an envelope with a strength and a position; everything you hear of it is the rest of the model responding.
It features a flow field with three things happening to it at once. Turbulence is shaped to Kolmogorov’s inertial subrange — three filtered noise sources weighted so their sum falls at f^-5/3 — and its intensity reads as the percentage a weather station reports, measured 4 to 27 % across the reference library. Gusts arrive as a Poisson process from under one to over thirty a minute, heavy-tailed so that most are unremarkable and a few are much stronger.
Under both sits a squall drift slower than a tenth of a hertz, which is not a detail: a median 43 % of the envelope variation in the references lives down there. What the flow drives is a broadband airflow bed with a four-pole spectral tilt, a low-frequency buffet, up to twelve aeolian tones, and foliage.
53 parameters and 23 factory presets ship with it, fitted against 63 field recordings, running from a soft breath to a howling storm by way of a cave mouth, a city street and a dune. Native CLAP for Linux and Windows, with sample-accurate note and parameter handling, host modulation, CLAP preset discovery, a fixable random seed for repeatable takes, and the suite’s window in SkyHowl’s own dust coral, with streaklines running across the header the way a wind tunnel shows a flow it cannot otherwise photograph. No samples anywhere.
…. and some secret is also included for a very special friend 😉