i'm having a lot of difficulty continuing to poke at this! [or anything kind of!] i've mutated the file 0416 i've changed the calculation of the default max_freq so that it is done as a ratio of min_freq. i think this makes more correct interpretations of subsignals i.e. every frequency in the scaled signal is itself scaled. i'm handling psychoticy stuff. i'm considering describing what i call a "psychotic break" as a "panic attack paired with a trance". the trance part aligning with how the mind kind of ignores checks and just experiences things. (Pdb) p inserting_spectrum @ inserting_ift array([0.5488135 , 0.5488135 , 0.5488135 , ..., 0.91970108, 0.91970108, 0.91970108]) (Pdb) p longvec array([0.5488135 , 0.5488135 , 0.5488135 , ..., 0.5488135 , 0.71518937, 0.71518937]) the frequencies look much lower with the max_freq change. i also moved the min_freq and max_freq claculations out of the conditional, and added a flag, to condense the code a little bit. snippet containing changes: else: min_freq = freq_sample_rate / freq_count user_provided_max_freq = max_freq is not None if max_freq is None: #max_freq = freq_sample_rate / 2 max_freq = freq_count * min_freq / 2 min_freq /= sample_rate max_freq /= sample_rate if freq_count % 2 == 0: if complex: neg_freqs = np.linspace(-max_freq, -min_freq, num=freq_count // 2, endpoint=True) pos_freqs = -neg_freqs[:0:-1] else: pos_freqs = np.linspace(min_freq, max_freq, num=freq_count // 2, endpoint=True) neg_freqs = pos_freqs[:0] else: if not user_provided_max_freq: max_freq -= freq_sample_rate / (2 * freq_count * sample_rate) pos_freqs = np.linspace(min_freq, max_freq, num=freq_count // 2, endpoint=True)