#34

Here is the Shepard tone scale as given in Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas R. Hofstadter. Can anyone tell me why there is no note for the lowest voice at the beginning of each measure? Is this a misprint or is it correct?

GEBShepardToneScale
GEBShepardToneScale3290×2512 162 KB

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#35

Very interesting. Given how tiny the next note up is, maybe it’s intended to signal inaudibility?

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#36

But why wouldn’t the last note in each measure of the upper voice be missing also, if that were the case?

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#37

Good point. This being 2019, I figured I’d see if Hofstadter is on Twitter, so I could ask, but he isn’t. Maybe someone else will have a good read on it.

#38

For this one, I liked the idea, but had little idea what to do with it at the outset. So, mostly followed my instinct with this. I actually did the piece of art I used for the track first in Processing, and then from that fixated on this feeling that my vision blurred as I looked at it, and had trouble distinguishing the lines from each other. So, that gave me the inspiration to build up this noise drone, that seems to slide in and out of pitch and has these different layers that seem to peek through and disappear.

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#39

Hey this is really cool! I’m playing with it right now. It looks like it has all the elements–the volume envelope, multi voice and pitch changes etc. There is an example in the examples folder (“deep” subdirectory) which does a similar thing but with more continuous tones and a Gaussian volume envelope (I don’t know that the difference from the sin function would be audible though).

I have fooled around a lot with ChucK, worked through the textbook and took the Kadenze course, and performed and compoised with it a lot. I have to admit I’m not a disciplined coder though, so I’m not the best guy to give advice on coding per se. The only formal training I’ve had is one FORTRAN class at the US Department of Agriculture in the 1980s! (It was a good class though!)

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#40

@homeontheland, this is great - a fine analogy to the perceptual aspects Op Art in an auditory sense.

I remember a similar exercise from my first or second year of Music Technology at the University of Adelaide, where our lecturer conducted a similar exercise. We weren’t told what was going to happen and he simply checked in with us beforehand to make sure we were feeling alright. He then shut the curtains to our large studio space and started the playback of a loop of him saying ‘experiment’ infinitum for the 15-20 minutes. Afterwards we were then asked to write down what we heard on a whiteboard. All kinds of things came about: ‘eggsperm’, ‘errumdrum’, ‘humdrum’, excrement’, etc.

I remember the process and outcome had a huge impression on me - it was definitely one of those inspiring WTF moments of my Uni days that would go on to influence my practice.

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#41

@Paul - absolutely brilliant.

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#42

I took this as an opportunity to finally do some Max learning and I was able to reproduce an audio illusion in my patch… Only problem is I forgot the sonic artistic expression part of the project :sweat_smile:

So this is a rather formal and sterile offering demonstrating the Glissandro Illusion. I set up all the parameters as described in the article and tried to created an oboe from a square wave with a pulse width of ~86%. And adjust various parameters to demonstrate how the effect changes when the panning freq. is varied, the freq. of the lfo on the glissandro and by reducing the synths in the mix

It turns out I still didn’t learn much about Max because I used a lot of the built in BEAP modules. And I couldn’t figure out how to hook up the UI nicely with Ableton - so I haven’t shared the patch here.

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#43

Thanks! At least I’m on the right track. After I’ve taken it as far as I can go, I’ll ‘peek’ at the ‘answer’ in the examples folder. I figured that somebody somewhere had already done this in Chuck.

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#44

Yes, I think that would have made an impression on me also!

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#45

I made something for this on Friday night. Also, hello, it’s my first post here after lurking for a long time :slight_smile:

A study of a single 16-step pattern on the Octatrack controlling a single voice Eurorack setup. Over time, the pattern thins out, with some notes changing, but mostly being removed; meanwhile gradual changes are applied to the timbre of the sound and effects modules, both manually and via LFO/S&H modulation. The timbral modulation, coupled with the delay and reversed reverb, creates the effect of different parts of the pattern having emphasis at different times.

Gear used:

Pamela’s New Workout
Intellijel Noise Tools 1U
Mutable Instruments Plaits (in Inharmonic String mode)
Mutable Instruments Warps (Parasites firmware in delay mode)
Bastl Cinnamon
Make Noise Erbe Verb (in reverse mode)

Elektron Octatrack for sequencing

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#46

Maybe this is unorthodox, I don’t know. My submission above was fun cause I had no idea what the Shepard tone was and it was fun to do. But I didn’t like it so much musically, So if no one minds I went back to my first idea upon reading about the op art part of this project, which was to create a sort of moire of LFOs. So here’s that:

In this scene our fearless protagonist looks out on intergalactic space, having run out of fuel but with life support still able to function for quite some time…

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#47

A moire of LFOs sounds great in my book.

#48

Vectoraster image -> Photosounder -> Paulstretch x 64 -> Ableton (Oli Larkin Endless Series for rising and descending Shepard tones; Waves Bauer Motion for rotation; various reverb effects).

I created the cover image in Vectoraster and rendered it with Photosounder to create a short .wav file then Paulstretched it 64 times and loaded into Ableton where I applied ascending and descending Shepard tones and eventual rotation effects.

Interestingly the image without additional processing generated its own ascending and descending Shepard tones, so the extra Ableton treatment was perhaps unnecessary.

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#49

when i was thinking about this project i happened upon a file named img3417.wav which i must’ve recorded on my camera to test what the sound was like. this fit well with the project in terms of the visual/aural connection

it was an acoustic guitar recording which was handy. altho i added a lot of fx so that doesnt really matter

i converted it to mono, duplicated this and made them into left and right channels. the right channel i applied paulstretch keeping it the same length and very little blurring

the idea was that this would create a haas effect - when the channels are offset up to ~50 milliseconds it creates a fake stereo effect. this is a psychoacoustic phenomenon because it relies on humans rudimentary capacity for echolocation (higher frequency sounds bouncing off objects arrive at the ears at slightly different times and thus give clues to location)

because paulstretch slightly adjusts the length even when you dont want it to i thought it could be used here

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#50

Ha! I see I’m not the only person to reference Nataraja by Bridget Riley. This is my take:

No keyboards were harmed in the making of this piece - all achieved via sample manipulation, recording and FX apps on a 2018 IPad using AUM and Cubasis. I took Shepard Tones into audio slicing app Sector, generated background audio by feeding Nataraja into Alexander Zolotov’s insane image to audio synth app Virtual ANS (based on a real Russian synth), and created the vocals using an app called Speak4Me. The inspiration was the brilliant radio play and later movie based on Tony Edwards’s novel Pontypool Changes Everything, in which a zombie infection is spread as the worst of all possible, uh, ear worms. :slight_smile:

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#51

Hi guys,

This is what Op Art sounds to me:

All made in Ableton Live. I mangled one of my old tracks which I did not really like into a drone made of long and repeating delays stopping suddenly and morphing into new phrases or silence and then starting again. I was trying to send a repetitive message not repeating and going nowhere by trying to go somewhere :slight_smile:

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#52

While there are many possible interpretations of sonic illusions, I decided to play with polymeters. This piece consists of seven instrumental tracks that fade in and out, concealing or revealing several different time signatures. 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, 6/4 and 7/4 are all represented. At any given point, you may hear a different meter depending on which tracks you’re concentrating on.

The music has a bit of a Philip Glass feel to it.

Cover art is my original photo art, inspired by Mercury the Messenger in recognition of the planet Mercury’s transit across the sun today.

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#53

Featuring : Slipping parts, extreme panning, shepard tones and phantom words. The main synthy music part was done in vcv rack.mixed roughly in protools.

thanks for listening

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