timbre vs rhythm (may contain chin stroking)

a little experimentation should prove that timbre and rhythm are in fact the same thing. the only difference is that our brains process things differently on either side of 20 hz.

speed up any rhythm enough, and it will turn into a continuous tone.

lower the pitch of any tone enough, and it will turn into a rhythmic pattern. i'm sure everyone is familiar with the nasty flapping, farting sounds that can result when searching for low low bass. it's like the sound falls apart when pushed too low.

this being the case, does anybody deliberately choose to compose rhythms using timbres that contain the same patterns? would the pattern recognition capability of our brains recognize the fractal nature of such music? or would it be a waste of time?

i know that there are experiments like this being done by people at MIT, but is anybody using this sort of thing out in the "real world"? i've been thinking about it for a while, but so far haven't put much effort into it.

This has really got me thinking this evening.

What if you had some kind of tone generator that worked by starting with, say, a 1 bar envelope. Then applied the same envelope to itself at 4 times speed, i.e. a 1 beat loop, and then so on forever ad-infinitum, until you get a tone?

You could have all kinds of variations too, e.g. two different alternating envelopes, using different factors of reduction. You'd probably get some amazing textures out of it.

Is there any tool that does this already? If not, I might have a stab at this when I've got some free time, and I've got my head round the VST API properly.

(I am stroking my chin as I type this)

i was thinking of doing it via a painful manual process of sampling a pattern, pitch shifting the sample by 8 or 10 octaves, then substitute the resulting sound for the original sounds in the pattern. possibly repeating as required. i'm sure there will be aliasing issues to sort out. maybe pitch shift wont be good enough - some sort of peak detection would do it?

figuring out an algorithm to do it in realtime is probably harder than hard, but a sample and hold type effect that dynamically adjusts the timbre of the sound based on the recently played rhythms could be crazy crazy sounding.

*cough* ableton live *cough*



:lol:

I'm not sure that Ableton Live does what either of us is talking about.

It'd be impressive if it did though.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Evil G

a little experimentation should prove that timbre and rhythm are in fact the same thing. the only difference is that our brains process things differently on either side of 20 hz.

speed up any rhythm enough, and it will turn into a continuous tone.

lower the pitch of any tone enough, and it will turn into a rhythmic pattern. i'm sure everyone is familiar with the nasty flapping, farting sounds that can result when searching for low low bass. it's like the sound falls apart when pushed too low.

this being the case, does anybody deliberately choose to compose rhythms using timbres that contain the same patterns? would the pattern recognition capability of our brains recognize the fractal nature of such music? or would it be a waste of time?

i know that there are experiments like this being done by people at MIT, but is anybody using this sort of thing out in the "real world"? i've been thinking about it for a while, but so far haven't put much effort into it.

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I've heard a number of hardstyle tracks which use this concept as a build-up technique. Usually the track is progressively sped up until it reaches a point where it is heard as a solid tone, taking the role as the main lead, with the original elements of the the track being re-indtroduced shortly after.
It's a pretty effective technique, but could end up sounding hackneyed if used too often...

Using ideas like this in different manners, such as those that have been described in this thread could be quite productive, no doubt producing some interesting results.

And for reference, I think the composer John Cage worked with the concept of fractal music a fair, so you might be interested in looking at some of his work.

Lastly - I just found these fractal music generators whilst looking up this subject - haven't tried using them yet, but they might be quite fun....

Musinum - http://reglos.de/musinum/
Fractmus - http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Haven/4386/

Quote:

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Originally Posted by "j_s

I've heard a number of hardstyle tracks which use this concept as a build-up technique. Usually the track is progressively sped up until it reaches a point where it is heard as a solid tone, taking the role as the main lead, with the original elements of the the track being re-indtroduced shortly after.
It's a pretty effective technique, but could end up sounding hackneyed if used too often...

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Excuse my ignorance ... but I thought that technique was done using lfo`s ... been messing about with a similer thing using Asynth 2 ..with version 2 you can import samples into it making things a lot more interesting.
I`ve still got loads to learn so please correct me if i`m wrong !

I've heard a lot of stuff using LFOs like this, but I'm fairly sure I have heard tracks which use the method I described also. Could be wrong though....