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why bare synths sound like trash
 

offline Chodi from 1337V1773 on 2012-12-29 10:04 [#02446568]
Points: 999 Status: Addict



Why do raw synths (shapes) sound so uncomfortable to our
ears??


 

offline sneakattack on 2012-12-29 13:47 [#02446571]
Points: 6049 Status: Lurker



I'm going to bullshit here a little.

(1) Our ears do some heavy signal processing which doesn't
play nice with these, certainly not the square wave. (For
this you can loop up CEPSTRAL and MFCC which are some
standard encodings meant to be similar to what our ears do,
and you can look up gibbs phenomenon to see what a pain square
waves are for fourier transforms).

(2) Relatedly / another intuition: there's no similarity to
the workloads our ears were evolved to be optimal for.

[side note: I recently read some of the spec for the ogg
OPUS format, and it makes good sense: they squeeze out more
quality from low bitrates by making sure they throw away
bits related to crap the human ear doesn't care about.
(That's a general trend in audio codec design, but they did
it in ways that were especially straightforward with regards
to this principle.) ]


 

offline Ultratech on 2012-12-30 01:10 [#02446587]
Points: 82 Status: Regular



protocols of the elders of zion explains it all


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2012-12-30 01:35 [#02446589]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



why is the sky pretty

what do drugs do


 

offline -crazone from smashing acid over and over on 2012-12-30 12:41 [#02446599]
Points: 11233 Status: Regular | Followup to Chodi: #02446568 | Show recordbag



It doesn't


 

offline Chodi from 1337V1773 on 2012-12-30 22:01 [#02446618]
Points: 999 Status: Addict | Followup to sneakattack: #02446571



I'm so happy you replied with something logical. :) I am
doing research on Delia Derbyshire and havehcome into some
simple questionings about sounds.

Here's a database ("a set of 1170 photos of Delia
Derbyshire's papers, going through each folder from start to
finish.")
LAZY_TITLE


 

offline Ceri JC from Jefferson City (United States) on 2013-01-01 23:22 [#02446715]
Points: 23533 Status: Moderator | Followup to sneakattack: #02446571 | Show recordbag



2) sounds plausible to me.


 

offline steve mcqueen from caerdydd (United Kingdom) on 2013-01-02 00:02 [#02446718]
Points: 6531 Status: Addict



:: Chodi, never seen those before TA

when u drag a slider on a touchscreen, and it decellarates
to the point u went, that's like a filter init .. ??


 

offline dave_g from United Kingdom on 2013-01-03 22:33 [#02446806]
Points: 3372 Status: Lurker



I'd hazard a guess that it's something to do with rate of
change.
Raw synth sounds have the filter wide open so you get the
high order harmonics. As alluded to above (Gibbs), you get
nice sharp edges to your waveforms like saw and square.

If your ear is tracking these then your ear drum's rate of
change is enormous on the discontinuities. Your body is
unlikely to want this to detach or damage itself hence the
discomfort to compel you to stop the irritant.

Close the filter a bit, the higher harmonics are attenuated
(reduced) and rate of change at discontinuities goes down
(edges start to change, e.g. square to trapezoid).

Therefore I would conclude that sine sounds ok, triangle
slightly less so, saw is worse and square is the worst.
Pink noise is probably the best because it is essentially
edgeless.

In reality industrial sounds such as a pneumatic drill are
unpleasant which lends me to think that it is to do with
fast edges and rate of change. i.e. rapid strike of metal to
concrete has impulsive fast transient bursts.



 


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