Mapping a textures z location from [0 to -40] to [0 - 1] for baking baking sound to f-curve First off, I am not sure if I'm asking the right question. I'm a modeler first and foremost. Its all I know :)
I make music visualizations.
Normally, to bake a sound to a value, I press &quot;i&quot; over a value to insert a keyframe and then go into the graph editor and bake sound to f-curve for that specific value. As far as I can tell, it only affects it in a positive direction.
What I'm used to doing...EX:

Using the &quot;factor&quot; in graph editor and baking sound to f-curve.
In this example, I'm using the frequency range of 0-120 to change the color of the object. Easy peasy. Goes from blue to red depending on how high the sound is.

The thing I can't figure out is how to do the same thing but with a materials z location mapping.

I've been told there is a Map Range node and I've done some research on it and understand the concept, but the implementation of it has stumped me.
Thanks for any and all help.
If I understand you correctly, you'd like to map the incoming 0-&gt;1 audio amplitude range from the baked f-curve, to a 0 -&gt; -40 range for use inside a shader node-tree.
You can key the incoming audio range into an Input &gt; Value  node, and map that to any other range you like with a Converter &gt; Map Range node:

... here, mapping  0 -&gt; 1 to 0 -&gt; -40, influencing only the Z-component of the location of the texture space. The 'Clamp' checkbox causes the output to flatline at the min and max of the ranges. If unchecked, the mapping extrapolates.
Using a Value node is more flexible than keying, say, the 'Fac' of a color-ramp directly. The single 0 -&gt; 1 audio input can be branched, and mapped to different ranges for different features of your tree.