Velvet Noise

[Duckett]

Not to derail the topic too far (hopefully), but I appreciated the verification of something my then-young ears had suspected- namely, the fact that there is nothing about Western music that, say, requires the whole heavy-vibrato thing found so, so much in string and vocal parts... lushness, volume tricks, it's no more "necessary" from a information standpoint than a solo acoustic guitarist using "corner-loading" before the days of amplification. It's so de rigeur stylistically and culturally that's for it to be absent sounds unnatural. Of course, folk traditions in many cultures will use an instrument to mimic a voice, or convey certain context through modulation, and there's vocalists like Sarah Vaughn who really stretched what could be expressed, not to devalue or diminish anything- only to point out even something like vibrato can be psychologically invisible and not immutable, like the "reason why major is happy and minor is sad".

What? Oh, dear. That was too far, wasn't it?

cough cough ...And now, back to your regularly scheduled "even noise turns out to be nuanced and complex subject" thread.

[martinvicanek]

[...] the "reason why major is happy and minor is sad".

Yes, perhaps off topic, but this fact has always intrigued me: Is this something we have acquired by listening to western music, or is it something fundamental, a priori? Why would we perceive it this way, does it provide a benefit in the sense of Darwin? Do animals feel the same way about major vs. minor?

[Duckett]

The area of 'cultural vs biological' is fascinating; Adam Neely's "Why is major 'happy' ?" does a decent job of delving into the music-theory side, but also please watch Notes and Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus for more on the subject.

[RJHollins]

Thanks for the links Duckett !

[HughBanton]

Blimey Adam Neely, that's an awful lot of chords. I'm sure Status Quo don't play any of those

[DaveyBoy]

I'm sure Status Quo don't play any of those

Rumour has it that Francis Rossi is suffering from repetitive strain injury . . . .
. . . . from playing the same three chords for the last fifty years

[HughBanton]

OK, I manged to set up a 4-channel / 4-speaker test this week, to investigate noise addition. I even used a sound level meter to measure dBs! Be impressed

First observation was that it makes no difference whether you mix electronically or acoustically. Ah. However .. in truth there was a small measurable difference - 4-noises mixed into 1 speaker reads approx +6dB, as per theory, whereas playing one each through 4 speakers it certainly looks more like 5.5dBs. Now that could just be experimental error, it's tricky to get everything calibrated and I didn't have a lot of time. However the four speakers were together in a line on a shelf, and I half wonder if it would be different if they were really spread out. That will have to wait for another day.

One thing I can say is that, imho, broadband noise (white/pink) sounds like it adds up more than tuned-type noise does (such as via a peaking filter), if you play four differently pitched noises. I tried this as well and the latter sounds more akin to normal 4-oscillator addition. Indeed, in summary, it sounds to me as though broad-band noise genuiniely overwhelms regular musical tones as you add more notes, whereas tuned noise does not, weird. But it's probably partly pscho-acoustic - me and my meter definitely disagree

Hope to return to this experiment at some point in time.

H

[martinvicanek]

Very interesting, Hugh, but what do you mean by "four differently pitched noises" or "tuned noise"? Is it noise run through a comb filter?
@Duckett: thank you for the links. Adam Neely has quite a few interesting videos, didn't know him before.

[martinvicanek]

Each violin in a section will be out-of-phase with the others. The peaks and troughs of the various sound waves will not occur at the same time. Thus N violins sound about Sqrt(N) times louder than one violin.

Thanks, Tula. The quoted argument is exactly what we are discussing: Uncorrelated sound sources tend to add incoherently, which means the powers of each source add, whereas the peak amplitude increases only as sqrt(N). As opposed to two oscillators with same frequency and same phase. But Hugh has found something that seems to be more intricate.

[HughBanton]

what do you mean by "four differently pitched noises" or "tuned noise"?

Noise sources put through a high-resonance bandpass-filter, so that they have a discernable keyboard pitch.

I guess the result of that is that their spectrums don't overlap each other so much, whereas broad-band noises do. Totally 100% do.

By the way I've since being playing with Velvet Noise filtered in this manner : VERY superior sound to uhh .. non-velvet noise. (What'll we call the old thing - sandpaper noise?)

H