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best app for a Shepard Tone
I'm a bit intrigued by an article on CDM (Create Digital Music) about the Shepard Tone. It's a sequence of notes or a tone going up in pitch to 12 semitones with multiple layers of the sequence up an octave. The bottom (lowest) sequence goes up in velocity and the top sequence (highest) goes down in velocity. When the sequence is repeated several times, it wil give the illusion that tone will rise forever.
A link to the article:
https://cdm.link/2020/03/infinite-fractals-shepards-tones/
My intention is to make a drone sound (machine like) that goes forever up in pitch, to create a haunting sensation.
What would be the best app to do such a thing?
Comments
That actually made me feel a bit queasy
I was going to try to replicate it, but I’m not now.
A Mozaic script maybe
I think it will take 2 apps:
1 to send 6 slow LFO (low frequency oscillator) signals via MIDI CC's
Repeat until nausea results.
This sound like a job for NS2 to me. But must DAWs probably the synth for the job the the automation too.
It wouldn't be hard to just take a wave of a tone and use pitch shifting and volume controls to make the 3 loops needed.
I wonder what it feels like to use faster (and faster) iterations of the up and down Shepard tones: 5 second sweeps, 4, 3, 2, 1, .5 . 0.25, ....
Who's got the right skills to make a few more IOS demos of the pure tone Shepard's tone and share their tool and workflow details? An NS2 project upload would be cool to use in some projects.
A Mozaic script shouldn't be that hard to pull together for the LFO automation that could target any synth that can sustain a 3 tones. It might even just manipulate the volume on 3 AUM tracks with looping tones.
Maybe just the @Brambos Rozeta LFO in AUM or ApeMatrix would be enough to drive the synth app or even 3 different apps.
Hell... why stop at 3? Who doesn't love some sub-tone bass in their mix.
Play and share!
I know how to create a Shepard Tone with notes in sequence (a ladder) and indeed it can be made with any synth.
What im looking for is a single tone or a note that goes up in pitch over a span of a couple of bars. I have just tried it with Mononoke. You can CC# the finetune knob with an LFO (Rosetta) to go up in pitch. Its also possible to set 3 pads at an octave distance, but i can't increase/decrease a pad in velocity. There seems no CC# for it.
Maybe i should dive into BM3. Record a tone, and do some manipulation in velocity and pitch.
Maybe something can be made with miRack...
Virtual ANS has a couple of Shepard Tone presets called Tone Infinity and Tone Infinity 2
Someone will pull one together sometime today and post the results here. We are Spartacus!
If I could remember how to retrigger envelopes, you could probably do it with a single Obsidian in NS2. 🤔 You have 3 oscs, 5 envelopes and 5 lfos, so you can just use 3 voices and delay / phase the lfos to do it in canon. Hold my beer.
Ok, I couldn’t get a decent cycle going with just three voices, so I used six Obsidians, copied and pasted the patch to all and phased the LFOs at 1/6 intervals to each other and controlled them from a single Obsidian parent. For convenience’s sake it is quite fast, but you can set the LFOs to any speed. Here’s a link to the project.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nn9pjtot5v4aapf/Shepard.nsa?dl=0
And here’s an audio file, but I changed the OSCs to nanosaw to get an even better effect.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6oiyn95rp5xqu7k/Shepard.wav?dl=0
A simple optimisation is to create a wave file of an oscillator sweeping up or down over 3 octaves and then
start three instances phased by 1/3rd of the overall recording time. I'm sure the effect works even if the start times
are not perfectly aligned on the octave intervals... if fact that might be useful to test as well for emotional impact of rising
dissonance.
I got it! I got it!
This is amazing....Just made it with 3x Mononokes, 3x Rosetta LFO, Bleass Delay and Alteza. The intro is a bit boring, the spectacle is in the second half...
Bleatmaker 3?
That's a great way to show the solution and also generate a video of the volume relationships for the rising pitches.
I used 1 LFO on midi channel 2 to control CC# 39 (fine pitch) of all 3 Mononoke's
Nope, sorry @Identor this doesn’t work for me like Hans Zimmer’s score in the recent movie whose name I can’t remember. It does get better toward the end, but I think it is always returning to the beginning that distracts me from the continual rise. Maybe a little more tweaking...
Yes. This is an attempt to modulate a single tone across 3 octaves while increasing and decreasing the volume across the life of a loop cycle.
The method is close to hitting the target. I'm sure we will see a perfectly execute solution here soon but his one
points the way to simple tools to take the challenge for AUM, Rozeta LFO and a target Synth that responds to
CC's to change the pitch.
Tha Hans Zimmer score involves taking the Shepard's Tone concept and applying it to a melodic theme orchestrated across the range of an orchestra using the Elgar Enigma Variation melodic material. A much more
complex idea to implement. But something a composer should find to be a good challenge and implementable in a DAW using any type of pitched sets of sounds/instruments in a Looping format.
A short example of that type of musical project would also get Gold Stars here:
Just create a melody that rises over and octave.
Repeat it 3 times up an octave each time.
Wrap all three iterations with a dome shaped volume envelope on that tracks volume automation
Loop the whole mess and fade the master after a could of minutes.
Harmonizing the melody and using additional ideass like a musical "round" where each iteration of an ascending motif is in harmony or counter point to the lower octaves theme only makes the music more compelling if executed well.
Create and share your explorations. Don't forget it works going up or down... maybe a longer piece should go up and shift to a down segment and finish with a dramatic double time up or an increase in a LFO for the BPM setting.
It's about adaption of your senses. In the beginning the illusion is not so obvious. After a while the tones get imprinted in the brain as a blind spot. The same as when you look into the sun, and when you look elsewhere, you still see the imprints of the sun on the eye sensor.
This is a great exercise for learning more about LFO's and AUM automations.
Enjoy this demonstration. Not an iOS app though so sorry if this went off topic.
I took a shot at a melodic style "Shepard's Tone Melodic Loop".
An ascending melody repeats over 3 octaves in a loop.
The Pad sounds are from Continua. There are some faint Spacecraft tinkling sounds in the mix and the whole Master bus goes into a FAC Alteza "Colossal Cave" reverb
3 copies of 1 audio track looped in AUM using recorded offsets to create the layered orchestration effect.
This is excellent @ McD! Very Zimmer!
It sounds indeed very good. This weekend i am trying somerhing in BM3.
I just took the same melody up 1-2-3 octaves but there's probably magic in crafting a
melody that starts on a root then goes up a 10th and up another 10th so you end with a
harmonized melody with all 3 playing. Then you slowly ramp up the volume on the lowest
octave. Stabilize the volume on the 2nd melody (middle range) and drop the volume towards
zero on the highest melody and infinite loop for a shepard tone illusion of a tune that never
descends like a Barber's Pole illusion.
There might also be a 1, 2 or 4 bar loopS that start on the 5th and ascends to the 3rd and ends with the root. Emulate the note intervals across the 3 iterations.
I wonder what an ascending melody against a descending bass voice design would feel like.
Using the general ascending or descending melody idea that overlaps another instance like a round is the key.