The Mushrooms is a software that detects onsets (events) in a sound signal and translates them into other sound functions. The onset detection can be done in either the time domain or the frequency domain (FFT). It depends very much on the sound analysed which method is better. There is a thresh variable that defines the thresholds of the detection. The minGap variable decides how far away each onset is in the time domain analysis. If it is very low, there will be more events and closer together.

The analysis is either done in the time domain (analysis of samples in the buffer), where the sound does not have to be played during the analysis, or through the frequency domain (where Fast Fourier Transform is used to find the onsets) and here the sound has to be played during analysis.

The playback rate of the sound can be controlled. The volume of the sample can be adjusted and so can the volume of the onset events.

And that's the main point of the software: to detect the onsets in a musical signal and trigger other events from them. The user can choose buffers to analyse from the buffer pool drop down menus on the top left, but then there are various different ways to map the onsets, such as a few synthesis types, writing code, triggering samples or triggering envelopes of audio stream that runs on silent busses (i.e. audio busses that are not going out to the sound system).