Posts in the «Audio Experiments» Category

Sound Of the Month Edition

Music of the prime numbers

Each harmonic corresponds to one prime number. A note is played on its beat-multiplication

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Zipped project

This idea was on my mind long before starting the whole Falasol project. What kind of cacophony would it be if each note is assigned a prime number and played only on the number’s multiplication beats. Total chaos? Or would the mind be able to recognize some hidden patterns?

It’s both. The brain can grasp 2 & 3-beat notes and arrange them into 6-beat tact ( 2 * 3 = 6 ). Next 5-beat harmonic creates a 30 beat verse (consisting of 5 described tacts). That’s the rhythmical clocking in the background. Next prime harmonics (7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37) add nothing more than chaotic wind-bells effect. The resulting patterns are way too long to be digested by the regular brain, but who knows, maybe some savant would do. Anyway, quite a good accompaniment to get insane :)

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Sound Of the Month Edition

Message right to your brain

Understanding sound impact on human mind

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Before reading further, please listen to the above sample. …read more >>

Sound Of the Month Edition

Falasol’s new features are popping up like crazy!

Popcorn effect spectrogram

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Falasol 1.2 is in beta phase! Let’s have a sneak peek into what’s coming. …read more >>

Sound Of the Month Edition

She’s low-budget. She’s mobile. She’s a perfect companion!

My Harmonica

Yes, that’s my recent fascination. Makes a clear and gentle sound. Can get rough when needed.
Of course I couldn’t resist to record myself and analyze it with my geeky tools. Let’s get the show started. …read more >>

Sound Of the Month Edition

Accelerating Vibrato makes a Sine wave explode into multiple harmonics

One sine wave + high speed frequency modulation

440 Hz harmonic modulated with speed: 0 -> 220 -> 0 [Hz] and amplitude: 0 -> 3 -> 0 [octave]

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Zipped Falasol project.

Looks like UFO and sounds like one :)

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Sound Of the Month Edition

Gusty wind effect – achieved by applying double noise

Wind effect spectrogram

330Hz harmonic randomized by both:

• High 44100Hz frequency noise of 1.5 octave on Harmonic – the grains on the image
• Low 1.5Hz frequency noise of 0.5 octave on Envelope – visible as hills

Let’s listen to it:

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Zipped falasol project. Quite chilly, huh?

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Sound Of the Month Edition

Harmonic noise vs Detuned noise

Harmonic - noise applied to sound envelope

Detuned - noise applied separately to each harmonic

4 harmonics randomized by 1 octave normal deviation with slow frequency of 10hz.
…read more >>

Sound Of the Month Edition

Transition from random pitch sliding into pinkish noise

880 Hz frequency randomized with standard variance of 1 octave and rising change rate

I took a simple 880 Hz sine wave and applied noise of standard variation = 1 octave.
At the beginning the random changes are slow – you can clearly hear the sliding tone. As the rate of changes gains more speed human ear tend to loose track of the tone and start hearing burping sounds. In the end, when the temperature gets really high (higher than tone frequency), the whole wave melts down into one uniform noise.

It’s just like blending a smoothie from an audio tone :)

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Falasol Timbre project zipped file: FrequencyOfChaos

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…read more >>

Sound Of the Month Edition

(2 IV 2010 note: this post was an April Fools Day joke. But if you were brave enough to listen you already figured that out ;)

Neural overload – induced consciousness loss

Shepard's tone modulated with brainwave frequency

Brainwaves originate in cyclic feedback interactions among populations of neurons (Neural_oscillation). In macro scale we can observe it with electroencephalography (EEG). What’s more, we can also influence these cycles – human brain has a tendency to change its dominant EEG frequency towards the frequency of a dominant external stimulus (Brainwave entertainment). We can easily exploit that behavior :)

Brainwave stimulation is commonly used technique in marketing industry.

You probably noticed that the music used in advertisements sounds a bit different than the original tracks. A slight tone modulation can alter your attitude – get you a little happier or more excited… and more likely to buy a product. Many emo rock bands use the same technique but with opposite effect.

My idea is to make the human neural system synchronize with continuously ascending  Shepard frequency. Such attempt results in neural deadlock which causes temporal consciousness loss. In order to restore it’s critical functions the brain must cut-off all the inputs and go through coma stage (just like computer restarts after blue screen of death). The process is still in research stage, so in order to prove the phenomenon is safe for health I need a control group of humans.

Help me broadcast the Ping of Death over commercial radio station – please donate.

There might be different reactions after recovering from unconsciousness – varying from slight headache, just feeling refreshed or having weird thoughts. I also noticed the audio-induced coma might be a bit addictive, but no harm seems to be done. Please use headphones (for others sake), remove the nearby sharp objects and sit down comfortably:

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Sound Of the Month Edition

This is what you get when you mess with Nyquist frequency!

Glissando from 422400 to 422,4Hz with sampling frequency of 44000Hz

In the analog world the hyperbola from the right side of the graph would go all the way up. You actually wouldn’t be able to hear such high pitches, but you’d see a nice hockey stick on the spectrogram. However digital sampling is not able to handle frequencies higher than half of it’s own frequency – that’s the Nyquist theorem. And that’s when the weird things start to happen :)

Sounds like a plasma cannon:

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Falasol Timbre project file: Nyquist effect.timbre

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