Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • 39 views

    Auditory Illusions in Modern Film Industry and Music: S. Hurskiy

    Uploaded by

    juan
    1. The document discusses auditory illusions, specifically Shepard tones, which create the illusion of a tone constantly rising or descending in pitch without actually changing in frequency. 2. Shepard tones have no specific pitch height but a specific musical note quality (such as C or B-flat). When played in a chromatic scale, listeners perceive the scale as continually rising or falling. 3. Shepard tones are used in music, films, and video games to build tension and suspense. Examples given include use in electronic dance music, Pink Floyd's "Echoes", and Christopher Nolan films like The Dark Knight to create the sound of an escalating motorcycle.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Auditory Illusions in Modern Film Industry and Music: S. Hurskiy

    Uploaded by

    juan
    39 views3 pages
    1. The document discusses auditory illusions, specifically Shepard tones, which create the illusion of a tone constantly rising or descending in pitch without actually changing in frequency. 2. Shepard tones have no specific pitch height but a specific musical note quality (such as C or B-flat). When played in a chromatic scale, listeners perceive the scale as continually rising or falling. 3. Shepard tones are used in music, films, and video games to build tension and suspense. Examples given include use in electronic dance music, Pink Floyd's "Echoes", and Christopher Nolan films like The Dark Knight to create the sound of an escalating motorcycle.

    Original Title

    Hurskiy

    Copyright

    © © All Rights Reserved

    Available Formats

    PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    1. The document discusses auditory illusions, specifically Shepard tones, which create the illusion of a tone constantly rising or descending in pitch without actually changing in frequency. 2. Shepard tones have no specific pitch height but a specific musical note quality (such as C or B-flat). When played in a chromatic scale, listeners perceive the scale as continually rising or falling. 3. Shepard tones are used in music, films, and video games to build tension and suspense. Examples given include use in electronic dance music, Pink Floyd's "Echoes", and Christopher Nolan films like The Dark Knight to create the sound of an escalating motorcycle.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    39 views3 pages

    Auditory Illusions in Modern Film Industry and Music: S. Hurskiy

    Uploaded by

    juan
    1. The document discusses auditory illusions, specifically Shepard tones, which create the illusion of a tone constantly rising or descending in pitch without actually changing in frequency. 2. Shepard tones have no specific pitch height but a specific musical note quality (such as C or B-flat). When played in a chromatic scale, listeners perceive the scale as continually rising or falling. 3. Shepard tones are used in music, films, and video games to build tension and suspense. Examples given include use in electronic dance music, Pink Floyd's "Echoes", and Christopher Nolan films like The Dark Knight to create the sound of an escalating motorcycle.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 3

    S.

    Hurskiy
    Research supervisor: P.P. Korniychuk,
    Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences,
    Associate Professor
    Zhytomyr Ivan Franko State University
    Language tutor: O.E. Kravets
    PhD (pedagogical sciences),
    Associate Professor

    AUDITORY ILLUSIONS IN MODERN FILM INDUSTRY AND MUSIC

    Auditory illusions are one of the most entertaining phenomenons, based on the
    peculiarities of the structure of our brain. Unlike optical illusions, they are not so
    easy to recognize. The listener hears either sounds which are not present in
    the stimulus, or "impossible" sounds. Auditory illusions highlight areas where
    the human ear and brain, as organic survival tools, differ from perfect audio
    receptors (for better or for worse).
    Pitch is a perceptual property of sounds that allows their ordering on a
    frequency-related scale, or more commonly, pitch is the quality which makes it
    possible to judge sounds as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical
    melodies.
    However, one cannot model pitch as a one-dimensional phenomenon. A
    problem with such a model is that it cannot account for perceived similarities
    between pitches that are not next to each other on a one-dimensional scale. An octave
    is the interval between two pitches when the frequency of one equals twice the
    frequency of the other. All notes of a certain type coincide if one views the helix from
    above. The helix becomes a circle, specifically, the chroma circle.
    In 1964 Roger Shepard surmised that if one could take pitch height out of the
    equation, listeners would hear only chroma. He created what have come to be known
    as Shepard tones — tones that have specific chroma (C, B-flat, etc.) but no specific
    height. When listeners hear an ascending chromatic scale using Shepard tones, they
    hear the scale constantly rising, but never getting any higher in reality.
    As a side effect the Shepard tone by its nature builds tension and suspense,
    hence it is used in music, movies, video games etc. For example it is very commonly
    used in electronic dance music. As the so called 'build-up' in progressive dance music
    is a very important aspect of the musical structure, the Shepard tone can be used as an
    effect to raise the song's energy to a certain level.
    It was used in the ending of the song "Echoes" from the album Meddle (1971)
    by English rock band Pink Floyd. There a Shepard tone fades out to a wind sound,
    which creates special mood. Also, the Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas uses
    a Shepard tone effect towards the end of his orchestral piece in vain (2000/02).
    In the film The Dark Knight and its follow-up The Dark Knight Rises, a Shepard
    tone was used to create the sound of the Batpod, a motorcycle which the filmmakers
    didn't want to change gear and tone abruptly but to constantly accelerate. Richard
    King, the sound designer behind The Dark Knight, said that ―Chris [Nolan] had the
    idea that it should never shift, that it should keep ascending in pitch like an
    unstoppable force, we had an idea to use a concept called The Shepard Tone.‖ The
    team later captured the sounds from electric race cars and Tesla models to find the
    base pitch to create the Bat-Pod’s Shepard Tone.
    It is being used a lot in Hans Zimmer productions (Interstellar, Dunkirk). For
    example, in the Dunkirk, a Shepard tone is used to create the illusion of an ever
    increasing moment of intensity across intertwined storylines.

    References
    1. Shepard, Roger N. (December 1964). "Circularity in Judgements of Relative
    Pitch". Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 36 (12): 2346–
    53. doi:10.1121/1.1919362.
    2. Deutsch, Diana (1986). "A musical paradox" (PDF). Music Perception. 3:
    275–280. doi:10.2307/40285337.
    3. Lerdahl, Fred (2001), Tonal Pitch Space, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-
    19-505834-8

    You might also like