Hiya All,

We know optical illusions, slights of hand and magic-like effects. Tricks leading to curiosity, amazement or even disbelief. [X-Files Theme] Are there any in the audio realm? Like the well known Haas effect, kinda tricking the distance between your ears. Or 3D placement, putting sounds in places? Not that impressive.

Bach's soundtrack to the Bible seems deeply visual, but it's more of a picture or story.

How about an illusion?
Is it possible to produce illusion in music?

And I do not really mean virtualizing sound, layering sounds, backmasking vocals and so on.
No cheap tricks, but the real good ones.

Like for instance,

Would it be possible to produce a song, beat or a track, that would show a constant drop of melody? I would personally like the bassline to always go lower and lower and in my imagination, when it really reaches the lows, there should be a way to consequently follow that melody line downwards, but with use of notes that still remain above the surface.

I guess it must be a relative feel in relation to the arrangement's harmonics etc.
But wasn't it Foster who introduced a trick to revive unaudible signals from the lowest frequencies with comps and sats back into the living?

My idea was to build everlasting notes downwards in a jazzy-bassy kinda way, like fretless and slappy. And like when the notes hit the bottom in an everdropping melody line, they would get filtered out and added back on top with added low-end. Like a spiral. But made not with filtering, but - and this is where I do not know how to do it or if it either is possible: kinda with voiceleading, glissandos, key changes, microtuning, changing guitars and amps - to build a song where the bassline seems to drop lower and lower without end.

 

Last edited: Dec 16, 2017

So not to brag, I have released a track on the well respected ZippyShare label

Code:

http://www107.zippyshare.com/v/CsrTN9f0/file.html

But in melody, it goes down and up again - basically two curves chasing another.

Would it be possible to make it always go down? :|

 

Last edited: Dec 16, 2017

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_illusion

 

Last edited: Dec 16, 2017

Yup, thanks a bunch!

 

Last edited: Dec 16, 2017

there is a trick you can take like 808 bass or low low bass put it through tape distortion and tube distortion in layers real gently but where it adds up
push the sound up higher so the illusion is the bass is real low deep, BUT you can play on even laptop speakers
its an illusion and a technique you can use make kick drums kit harder deeper and bass lower but play on any system

our hearing thinks it in the low region but its actually the harmonics in the higher region

here is an example of it

hear that rubber band like sound that comes across super deep and low?

you can do it with any lower sound and "push it up to lower mids and free up space"
here anothe rone that has it

you can do on any sounds that have real low deep aspects

 

Last edited: Dec 16, 2017

I also had this kind of digital mirroring in mind, but I would like to achieve this "drop" purely instrumental aswell, with use of fe. three bass guitars: a low, medium and humming sounding one.
Would it be possible to recreate that Risset/Shepard tone effect just by shuffling notes between the instruments?

I have been able to loop myself in many times over with use of the Permut8 plugin btw ;)

But orchestrating this idea would be much more useful.

And I know this idea is way too blunt to be useable - melodies need to dance more than that with eachother to make it a hit but as mentioned, I am just looking for illusions.

 

Gah!

 

I can explain this.

Mp3 midi conversions tone sounds why they work

I was recently made aware of some videos on YT, resulting from some mp3 > MIDI conversion process. Now when you play them back, the default instrument is PIANO, and you may hear something sounding like the original or not depending on song. Now if you change the instrument to something like flute, or ocarina,(MSGM WVTS) it sounds much closer to the original, something like a very low bitrate of the original. You might even recognize some words or syllables. This works. Why?


These crapppy MP3 > MIDI converter, what they're supposed to do is to recognize notes, ie, strip harmonics,, but keep the fundamental, except most aren't very good at that, and keep the harmonics..SO it's more of a tone recognizer than a note recognizer, which is good , because Harmonics & fundamentals are what make up a sound. The recognition process usually transforms the original into a frequency domain representation of the original, then it applies some thresholding to detect notes, so you end up with a highly quantized version of the original that might be somewhat recognizAble. . If you choose a MIDI instrument which sounds closer to a sine wave, you hear something closer to the original.

Because MIDI has a limited range of notes (up to B9 or something) w, it will sound like a low passed version of the original if you use sine-like sound.s with a strong fundamental & weak harmonics. TO remedy this, use a sine-like sound with harmonics ie, strong fundamental _ lots of overtones like maybe synth voice. Then you'll get high frequencies as well, but maybe at the loss of intelligibility of syllables.

====

BTW, I don't consider partial reconstructions illusion. It's related to "Hearing a missing fundamental frequency, given other parts of the harmonic series" from wiki. It's how the human hearing system works.

 

Yeah, but blurring the main line with fattened sound is like just an improvement on a trick. I would like to know in raw notes where the skip happens Or is the trick as simple as to skip whenever you want, but to make it sound as if you havent?
It's probably all connected and there must be numerous modes of how it syncs together.

Btw, is it just me or does that Risset/Shepard tone sound as if it is easier to climb up than to fall down?

Also - this regards frequency. What about tempo?

Can a swaying BPM affect frequencies in a way to achieve more possibilities for musical illusion?
I mean this kinda thing:

 

Last edited: Dec 17, 2017