In Ableton Live, for example, you can open Operator (which defaults to a sine wave), and proceed to input every iteration of a particular pitch class, covering the entire range of human hearing.Īs illustrated below in the case of a Shepard tone constructed on C, the MIDI roll will be composed of every C from C -2 to C 8. One simply loads up their DAW of choice and opens a basic synthesizer. While it required some truly innovative computing at the time of its origin, creating a Shepard Tone is fairly simple in the present day. How Do You Make A Shepard Tone In Ableton Live? These did not exist prior to electronic synthesis, which is why the Shepard Tone only came to be in the 1960s. The most essential building blocks of the Shepard Tone are pure sine waves. These terms tend to get used interchangeably which can make things confusing. In this case, the Shepard Tone has been “animated” to create a Shepard Scale – the illusion you are probably already familiar with. If you’ve looked up examples of Shepard Tones, you’ve probably heard a sound that seems to move either up or down but never reaches its destination. How Is A Shepard Tone Created?įirst, we need to distinguish between a Shepard Tone and a Shepard Scale. In this article, we will explore the Shepard Tone and its uses for both music-related research as well as composition and production. While tones played on instruments consist of a fundamental pitch and a series of softer partials, the Shepard Tone essentially has no single fundamental, and any partials are equal in volume.ĭue to this, the Shepard Tone allows one to engage with pitch as if all octaves were flattened into a single set of twelve pitch classes that seem to move up or down infinitely, like an auditory barber pole. The Shepard Tone is named after Roger Shepard, the cognitive scientist who first generated Shepard Tones and published his research in a 1964 article published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America entitled Circularity in Judgments of Relative Pitch. Put most simply, the Shepard Tone is a computer-generated tone consisting of every octave of a single pitch superimposed into a single sound. Also consider checking out our guide on the tritone paradox.What are some examples of the Shepard Tone in music and sound design?.How has the Shepard Tone been used for research in music perception?.Disclosure: We may receive commissions when you click our links and make purchases.
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