6 ms·
Shepard Tone
- dixego 4y agoFranz Ferdinand's "Always Ascending" is a fun rock song featuring a Shepard Tone in the background. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crjugtkXZN4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crjugtkXZN4
- _Microft 4y agoIf you want an interesting animation on top of that, here is a Shepard-Risset glissando with an animation based on work from M.C. Escher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9VMfdG873E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9VMfdG873E
- BLKNSLVR 4y agoThe animation is actually more engaging than the sound, but they do work amazingly well together.
- peanut_worm 4y agothis sound gives me a feeling of anxiety for some reason
- mcint 4y agoI don't imagine the descending shepard tone feels different to you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GkuXfgUoro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GkuXfgUoro Sounds like a jet engine spooling down to me
- genezeta 4y agoEven though I don't think it used this same effect but rather a simpler sound, I am reminded of MB's Star Bird, a toy spaceship from the late seventies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORtzJ3gZ5ho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORtzJ3gZ5ho https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Bird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Bird
- hamburglar 4y agoWhen I was 7 I wanted this toy for Christmas more than anything in the world. I got it. Obviously, life has been great ever since.
- PaulHoule 4y agoThat’s the sound of the wave motion gun charging up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty-1zWsXFNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty-1zWsXFNs
- jodrellblank 4y agoThis YouTube video is the best example of a Shepard Tone I've heard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsBanpBQj0k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsBanpBQj0k In a dystopian way it's the ever rising desire of intensity and panic for the economy to eternally grow. Similar to the visuals of this eagle's wing and lion's fur: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e5/34/b3/e534b3beef8e2e2d576593d59e59b82a.gif https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e5/34/b3/e534b3beef8e2e2d5765... continually flowing outward, but the overall look staying the same. Together they have become how I think of human generations ; forever birth, aging, death of individual people outflowing to the isolated edges of old age, but the overall structure holding. Differnt to a river made of individual water drops or history repeating like a spiral.
- matja 4y agoReminds me of Ricardo, Butch (Butric) - Up : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR-H36Vgr00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR-H36Vgr00
- tpoacher 4y agoThe lion/eagle thing looks like Line Integral Convolution animated with a periodic kernel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_integral_convolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_integral_convolution
- kthartic 4y agoVox did a great video on how Hans Zimmmer used this in the Dunkirk soundtrack to create growing suspense and anxiety. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVWTQcZbLgY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVWTQcZbLgY
- farleykr 4y agoThis was the first thing I thought of. I love that the technique relates to the tone and themes of the movie instead of just being a cool effect.
- Karellen 4y agoHuh. Whereas my first thought is always the noise of the bat-cycle from The Dark Knight - which is also directed by Nolan and scored by Zimmer.
- kristianp 4y agoThat's where I came across the article, from reading about Zimmer. Dunkirk had a very loud, but great soundtrack!
- thesz 4y agoI think, Philip Glass used Shepard scale in some parts of Koyaanisqatsi soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEWy2QORDV4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEWy2QORDV4
- bitwize 4y agoAs used in Super Mario 64: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B-udfiFZcko https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B-udfiFZcko
- aendruk 4y ago#Examples
- anderiv 4y agoI have always seen Tom Jobim’s “Águas de Março” as a beautifully-conceived usage of Shepard’s Tone in a song: https://youtu.be/wBEesrdaRog https://youtu.be/wBEesrdaRog
- daviddaviddavid 4y agoI have been in love with this song for decades. There is definitely a feeling of circularity going on. Here are a couple of my favorite versions, if anyone wants to go down the rabbit hole. SF Jazz Collective (heavy modern jazz arrangement): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-F_1OvPdqA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-F_1OvPdqA Cassandra Wilson (earthy, lyrics in English): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIehPcFebHo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIehPcFebHo Trio Mocoto (melody played on Cuica, which is nuts): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqTlFa3Fnlk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqTlFa3Fnlk
- anderiv 4y agoThese are fantastic. Thank you! I can't imagine how in the world that person in Trio Mocoto played the melody on that instrument. Mind-blowing. As an aside, I recently heard on the radio a cover of this by Art Garfunkel, which may be one of the worst things I've heard. As you may expect, he mananged to strip all of the life out of the song, which made me sad.
- trbleclef 4y agoI always heard it the other way... constantly descending (like rain)
- anderiv 4y agoSame. Shepard's Tone can refer to either perceptually-rising or falling tones.
- abruzzi 4y agoI've always thought a shepard tone is basically an audio version of a barber's pole. When it spins, it looks like its endlessly rising.
- novosel 4y agoYou thought right. I would also like to recommend a (?)recent(2011) paper investigating perpetual accelerando rhythms (no affiliation). (note to myself -- too many brackets) D. Stowell, Scheduling and composing with Risset eternal accelerando rhythms http://c4dm.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/papers/2011/Stowell2011icmc.pdf http://c4dm.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/papers/2011/Stowell2011icmc.pdf
- klyrs 4y agoIn both, the illusion can be broken by focusing on the top or the bottom. This is pretty easy for me with discrete scales, but a bit harder in the glissando at the bottom of the article. I've got nothing on the perpetual melody, though.
- a-dub 4y agothat's exactly right. psychophysics is fascinating! my favorite example of a shepard tone appears in an old wilco track that appears to be missing from the list. notably shepard wrapping forms the basis of octave invariant chroma scales used in handcrafted features for old school automatic music transcription algorithms. (probably supplanted by nn stuff today)
- WFHRenaissance 4y agoWatch CNN/FOX for 1 month and you'll become very familiar with the mechanism. Somehow things can always be getting worse.
- skybrian 4y agoSometimes the bass notes (left hand) on an accordion are blended in this way. The stradella bass only lets you play a single octave of bass notes. But if each note plays octaves, and as you go up the scale, the top octave fades out and the bottom octave fades in, it's not very easy to tell which octave you're in.
- mvdwoord 4y agoI sometimes compare this to the seemingly ever rising absurdity of life/business/politics etc. "The Shepard tone of insanity" Things seem to perpetually get worse in some way, or so it seems. But often it just appears that way due to similar mechanisms of newly introduced stupidity. Or something like that.
- farleykr 4y agoI learned recently, via a Tolkien biography, that this is the Medieval view of the world - that things are always getting worse.
- knodi123 4y agoYeah, I call that the fallen world fallacy. Once you recognize the basic concept, you start to see it everywhere. Atlantis was some amazing civilization that did everything right, but then some corrupt stinker spread his corrupt ideas it and it fell. The Garden of Eden was perfect, and some schmuck ruined it, and things immediately started to suck, and continued to suck more the further we got from it. Etc etc. These are the underpinnings to so many independent world cultures. It's fascinating. I wonder if it's just inherent to human minds? Or if it's a natural consequence of how we start off as infants having everything taken care of for us, in a world where everyone we know has a defined role and mostly sticks to it, and then as we grow, we find more and more responsibility, and opportunity to make mistakes, and we learn that adults are just fallible humans like us...
- WorldPeas 4y agoIn my personal view, I think the reason this mindset exists is that humanity never solves all problems at once. We're constantly playing a game of marco-polo crossed with whack-a-mole. Sure we may never solve all of our problems, but that's the fun of being a human.
- temp0826 4y agoMynoise has a shepard generator- https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/shepardAudioIllusionToneGenerator.php?c=3 https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/shepardAudioIllusionToneGe...
- mcint 4y agoI want to figure out how to specify a Shepard tone in `sox`. (Open invitation to draft with me on thread.)
- harveywi 4y agoUsually this is done in a `kilt` as well. The key is to use a bagpipes.
- thescriptkiddie 4y agoThe game Elite: Dangerous uses shepard tones as part of the FTL drive sound effect. The sound design in that game is really good in general, here is a talk on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiAcsrmyePs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiAcsrmyePs
- jancsika 4y agoOld school version: https://youtu.be/tg50ozbZcqM?t=216 https://youtu.be/tg50ozbZcqM?t=216 In the stepwise descent Bach uses the complementary interval of a seventh to leap up before he runs out of pedal notes (i.e., a seventh is just a step with the lower note moved up an octave). But organ pedals typically have some turbocharged partials grooving along, so the leap up a seventh can easily be confused with change of tone color or even volume change on a descending step. Paired with the sustained chromatic harmony changes in the right hand, the pedal's bassline seems to be eternally descending. (Plus Bach extends this unadorned circle of fifths passage much longer than he normally would in any other piece-- if the purpose isn't to imply a potentially eternal descent I don't know what he's doing here...) Try listening without watching the scrolling score and see if you can pick out where those pedal leaps are. Also-- ascending new school version, now with "carriage returns": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6LmG9myHxA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6LmG9myHxA You also get a nice simulated "Nyquist frequency" when the piano runs out of keys. :) Edit: clarification
- stevengoodwin 4y agoHear it here, being used to symbolise the drifting into an infinite sleep: https://steevonhypothesis.bandcamp.com/track/the-dream-song https://steevonhypothesis.bandcamp.com/track/the-dream-song
- dschuessler 4y agoThrowing in a rare case of a descending shepard tone for good measure. It appears as background sound in the canceled Star Wars 1313 game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3TZFZ1fHhA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3TZFZ1fHhA
- kidnoodle 4y agoA thoroughly panic inducing example is the basis for Anna Meredith’s Sawbones - https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=TsgNYUfdv9A&feature=share https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=TsgNYUfdv9A&feature=share