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Chodi
from 1337V1773 on 2012-12-29 10:04 [#02446568]
Points: 999 Status: Addict
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Why do raw synths (shapes) sound so uncomfortable to our ears??
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sneakattack
on 2012-12-29 13:47 [#02446571]
Points: 6049 Status: Lurker
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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.) ]
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Ultratech
on 2012-12-30 01:10 [#02446587]
Points: 82 Status: Regular
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protocols of the elders of zion explains it all
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2012-12-30 01:35 [#02446589]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular
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why is the sky pretty
what do drugs do
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-crazone
from smashing acid over and over on 2012-12-30 12:41 [#02446599]
Points: 11233 Status: Regular | Followup to Chodi: #02446568 | Show recordbag
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It doesn't
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Chodi
from 1337V1773 on 2012-12-30 22:01 [#02446618]
Points: 999 Status: Addict | Followup to sneakattack: #02446571
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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
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Ceri JC
from Jefferson City (United States) on 2013-01-01 23:22 [#02446715]
Points: 23533 Status: Moderator | Followup to sneakattack: #02446571 | Show recordbag
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2) sounds plausible to me.
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steve mcqueen
from caerdydd (United Kingdom) on 2013-01-02 00:02 [#02446718]
Points: 6531 Status: Addict
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:: 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 .. ??
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dave_g
from United Kingdom on 2013-01-03 22:33 [#02446806]
Points: 3372 Status: Lurker
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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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