[jcims]

I wonder how many folks that spend thousands of hours in front of a synthesizer or making electronic music or beats have identified similar illusions but don't really think of it as something 'interesting'. Like, 'oh yeah if you do this it kind of sounds like that'. Probably a whole catalog of tricks.

[v64]

Happens all the time. Most common one for me is when you're making a patch on a synth and by chance dial in those frequencies that align with formants (similar to the Robot Rock effect the post mentions).

Yesterday I was working on a bass drum beat, and after adding some synths playing on top of it, I started to hear the bass drum echo. So, my first thought was I had accidentally enabled some kind of reverb or echo effect on it while I was setting up the synths. After confirming I hadn't and isolated the track to ensure the bass drum was sounding as intended, I chalked it up to some weird illusion between the synths and drum that was making it sound like an echo. I know it's not there in reality, but I can't unhear it.

In this case, I went back and added a little echo to the drum to make the effect intentional, which turned out to sound good, but sometimes I'll try to make the illusion reality and it doesn't have the same effect.

[metamet]

I always wonder if it's some odd thing going on in the DAW.

Would you be willing to export that track as two tracks--one with drums and one with synth? Then listen to them solo, then run them together (with WAV files instead of instrumentation)? Would be neat to have that illusion confirmed rather than it being a DAW artifact.

[v64]

My setup's DAWless (this was two synths and a drum machine plugged directly into a mixer that was outputting to speakers) and I didn't end up making any records of this session, so I can't provide WAVs, but I can rule out DAW artifacts :)

[mergejoin]

would you mind sending a mp3 of that effect? just curious :)

[v64]

unfortunately as I said in an adjacent comment, I didn't end up making any recordings of this session, but will keep it in mind if I can make it happen again in the next couple of days!

[jnurmine]

When I was 14 years old, I noticed how pure saw waves make fast transient sounds go "whooshy".

1. Play a pure saw wave sound for several seconds, it has to be loud (use headphones), then

2. hit the keyboard keys, or snap your fingers, or make other sounds with fast transients, and the transient is no longer snappy, it "whooshes". It's hard to describe but there is like a flanging effect on it.

I guess there is some scientific name for this phenomenon, but I don't know what.

[empath-nirvana]

There's entire books and blog posts and youtube channels that go into all of this. Music production is all about creating a "space" and a lot of what producers do is create the illusions that sounds are coming from particular places, and that sound like they're from a "big" source or whatever.

A common thing to do is to pan a synth to one side, then add a very short (milliseconds) delay panned to the other side, which makes it sound like a very large sound played from a large distance away.

Another is stacking up a bunch of oscillators that are slightly detuned from each other, which again, makes the sound "big", because it sounds like many sources playing together, rather than one source.

Just using a "reverb" is generating an illusion of being in a large, echo-y space.

I do think that most producers don't really think of it as creating illusions, and more as making "cool" sounds.

[whiddershins]

Yes