music nerds, explain to me the Shepard Tone

found a link to it while looking up penrose stairs as mentioned in inception. I listened to the ogg on the wikipedia page but I still don't quite know what's going on. what's going on?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone

i think it works like a barbershop pole -- the stripes appear to be always moving up! but where do they go?

i remember doing this in a psychology of music class in college. can't remember anything to help you. sorry

Wow, that's freaky!

is it something to do w/since there are so many octaves present, that once a note gets so low, you're unable to hear it anymore. then you start hearing the higher ones that you weren't able to hear before because they were too high?

^ this

the shepard tone is theoretically an infinite number of sine waves added together, spaced apart by octaves, but run through a filter so that the lower + upper ends of the frequency spectrum taper out. this is how one is able to achieve the illusion of an infinitely rising or falling tone, because as you go up the scale the higher octaves will fade out almost unnoticeably while lower octaves fade in almost unnoticeably (obv it's the reverse as you go down the scale). the tone itself sounds kinda like an organ.

but can you get high off it?

(i propose a courageous experiment to find out)

This is bonkers!

cool! sounds like melting glass

this page has a pretty cool applet, I think it works best on a slowish speed setting

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/nest/imager/contributions/flinn/Illusions/ST/st.html#demo

now I'm wondering if the reason I liked that one godspeed song...uh the first one on lift yr skinny fists, was because they used a shepard tone to build a never ending crescendo

Yeah studied these in college, there is also a version that moves up in steps like a never-ending scale - even more like those stairs in inception.

I went to see Andy Weatherall dj one time and he played a techno track with a shepard tone and it was AMAZING

The very end of Pink Floyd's "Echoes" is another great example of this

Yeah studied these in college, there is also a version that moves up in steps like a never-ending scale - even more like those stairs in inception.

i am seeing this in like 45 minutes SPOILER ALERT JESUS GD CHRIST

it's in the OP gibo!

I went to see Andy Weatherall dj one time and he played a techno track with a shepard tone and it was AMAZING

it was probably this (the shepard tone is right at the end) -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djArryrQrHc

i have wasted many a good hour programming a shepard tone just for the buzz.

Ah, know of these as Risset tones, looks like that's the electronic/sine wave interpretation.

that's what's going on here, right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqRd555v0Hg

Oops sorry about that, it is in the very first post in the thread tho (as someone else has said already)

Stirmonster - middle of the night here so no techno bangers but look forward to checking that 1 out in the morning, cheers

ok, that's deadly. can't remember if it's the one AW played tho... that was a couple of years ago

....and I've just discovered I have it on an old techno compilation. This day is starting well!

This!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuxrHR8t5-A