Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by riemannzeta 670 days ago
Thank you! I'm so glad to have that confirmed. I feel like I do hear them, and actually have come around to liking them. They feel quite different from what you get with a pure harmony in Just Intonation -- maybe the ephemerality of the flow of energy back and forth between different subharmonics adds to the excitement somehow.

It's hard for me not to think of the electric guitar in this context. I love the purity of an acoustic played in a plangent tone like Django. But the incredibly rich spectrum introduced when an amplifier saturates and tons of additional harmonics and subharmonics that aren't supposed to be there gets introduced -- that's it own kind of excitement. Like falling into an abyss aurally.
2 comments
pbronez 669 days ago
How do you feel about Ring Modulation? It’s another step into weird.

https://youtu.be/9PmHWap1T-E?si=9lbiTQSU1ARFBKeD

link
naltroc 667 days ago
Ring Modulation adds a constant frequency above and below the source frequency, producing non-integer relationships between the input signal and the new signal.

That's why it sounds weird, because both of the new tones will almost never be harmonically related to the input signal.

link
riemannzeta 669 days ago
I don't know that much about ring modulation, but having read a bit about it, I think I love at least most of the uses of it I know. The guitar solo in Paranoid Android is one of my favorites in any record. But I love pretty much everything Jonny Greenwood has ever done.
link
naltroc 667 days ago
that delightful "abyss" is really just noise. as in white/pink/blue noise.

Signals tend to sound "better" (richer harmonic content) when they have fuzz added. Convolution reverb is a great example of how mixing a noise sample into any source signal increases its apparent depth or richness.

Some saturators do the same thing.

Others distort the signal by boosting selected harmonics (making the waveform more square-like or more sawtooth-like for example, which is not the same as noise and has a different sound).

Clipping the signal by requesting amplitudes beyond the available range is another way to add "cruch" (noise) to a signal.

The actual implementation will vary per device but overall we like our sounds cut with a bit of noise.

link