Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch - Aaawwweeesssooommmeee

[Edvard]

For all you audio manipulation freaks...

This is a program for stretching the audio. It is suitable only for extreme sound stretching of the audio (like 50x) and for applying special effects by "spectral smoothing" the sounds.

http://hypermammut.s...rge.net/paulstretch/

Check it out stretching the Jurassic Park theme 1000%!!
http://soundcloud.co...rk-theme-1000-slower  



from http://admit-one.net

[mouser]

nice find 

[Deozaan]

Wow!

Now I can turn my 15 second musical ditties into full length albums!

[Renegade]

That was pretty cool.

It's always interesting how different approaches can have such radically different effects for the same basic task. The extreme stretching there effectively gives you an entirely different work of art. It would be cool if the "tunnel echo" could be removed some. (Didn't play with it all that long.) It does sound pretty "ghostly" though.

[Edvard]

Apparently It's almost a new meme:
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/800-slower

It would be cool if the "tunnel echo" could be removed some.

-Renegade (March 12, 2011, 07:25 PM)

The code is there to play with, maybe a tweak to the "smearing" process would help.
Here's Paul (the software's author) explaining to NPR how it works:
http://www.npr.org/b...rt-of-a-time-stretch
Renegade, how does this compare to your own Guitar & Drum Trainer software?
Does it work similarly?
NVM, I tried a few and it's an entirely different beast.

Wow!
Now I can turn my 15 second musical ditties into full length albums!

-Deozaan (March 12, 2011, 07:23 PM)

Care to share a clip?  

[Edvard]

Here's the Windows XP startup sound at 10x with a window size of 3.125:

[cranioscopical]

Here's the Windows XP startup sound at 10x with a window size of 3.125:

-Edvard (March 14, 2011, 07:56 AM)

Finally, something on Windows that moves at my pace!

[IainB]

@Edvard: Many thanks for this.
Very nice find.     

[IainB]

I had listened to:

• The Jurassic Park theme 1000% stretch.
• The Windows XP startup sound at 10x with a window size of 3.125 (provided above by @Edvard)

Here's one I did with PaulStretch: Harp upwards stretch.wav (2.3Mb)
(It's just a quick riffle upwards across the harp strings, slowed down.)

And here are some interesting Musical Illusions
I find the "Phantom Words" one intriguing. Amazing what our brains can make up in an effort to make sense out of some sounds. What do you hear?

[Edvard]

Very nice, Iain.  I found the Musical Illusions site interesting, though I thought a mention of Shepard Tones^w would have fit right in. I was especially interested in the Phantom Voice.  Though not what I expected, it reminded me very much of the song "Opus 4" by the Art of Noise. 

What I was expecting was that peculiar phenomenon whereby a subject will hear voices or music in white/pink noise,appearing just below the threshold of comprehension.  I personally find this especially noticeable when combined with a coherent sound (any regular tone or rhythm), first discovered out fishing with a friend; the sound of rushing water + the sound of my friend humming produced the illusion of voices, in fact a conversation between two parties, which would cease when my friend stopped humming.  Since then, I have heard it in the humming of a case fan, in the wind when a car passes by, etc.  I have also read somewhere that shamans of many cultures would produce this phenomenon by various means, most commonly the use of different types of rattles or objects shaken in a bowl.
More about that here (never mind the paranormal slant if it's not your thing, the description of the phenomenon is exactly as I have experienced):
http://atransc.org/r.../voices_in_noise.htm

Try different windows startup sounds, the 98SE one is quite nice:
http://www.winhistor...tart/winstart.htm.en

[IainB]

Very interesting. Thanks @Edvard.
Yes, I thought of the Shepard tones too, listening to those "Musical illusions".
I followed all the links you gave and also downloaded the collection of 9 historical files of Windows startup sounds. I only had a couple of those.

Been playing about with PaulsStretch a bit lately, and it seems to me that:
(a) the music you input to it has to sound nicely harmonic/in harmony before you can expect to get a particularly good output;
(b) the music might need to be in a relatively fast tempo to sound its best.

Here is: Wuala introduction (John cartoon) stretch.wav (200.5Mb)
- as an example. The music was taken from from an advertisement video for Wuala. It's a fast and very catchy little tune.

I also stretched Widor - Symphonie V, op.42 no.1 Toccata - Allegro, which worked out to 502.3Mb and about 47mins of playing time. I didn't put that up in the cloud. That piece of music is one of the most powerful and beautiful organ pieces ever written. Must be a hellishly difficult piece to play - very fast, and necessitates the player using both feet and all 7 digits of each hand. It sounds spectacularly different when stretched. Reminded me of the forgotten pleasure I used to get in my childhood, when I would listen for hours to slow piano chords as I played them loud-pedal (un-dampened) on the piano, one after the other. The harmonics fascinated me.

Some of the stretched sounds in the Wuala music have an envelope that makes them sound rather like listening to rotating-vane speakers.

I am currently experimenting with stretching recordings of throat-singing voices. The secondary (resonating) notes/voices seem to go up in 10ths above the primary voices, so are not much like more conventional harmonies.

[mouser]

Since this thread got resurrected it does pay to mention that long time DC member Renegade has a neat app for slowing down music for helping musicians learn:
http://renegademinds...abid/94/Default.aspx

[IainB]

^^ Thanks @mouser. That's interesting - it's a novel idea to me. I never realised that "slowing down" music might help to learn it. I was taught just to look at the notation on the musical score to see what was going on and at what tempo. I might try out this slowing-down idea for Lily's guitar practice.

[IainB]

Thought I'd tack this onto this thread as it relates to another excellent Radiolab audio post - this one about the speed at which music is played, in the context of the "metronomic" beat. They play some stretched music of the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth to illustrate the contrast in tempos and the effect on our senses of altering the timing (tempo) of music.
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)

Speedy Beet
tags: beethoven, classical_music, idea_explorer, shorts, speed
There are few musical moments more well-worn than the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. But in this short, we find out that Beethoven might have made a last-ditch effort to keep his music from ever feeling familiar, to keep pushing his listeners to a kind of psychological limit.

Big thanks to our Brooklyn Philharmonic musicians: Deborah Buck and Suzy Perelman on violin, Arash Amini on cello, and Ah Ling Neu on viola.

And check out The First Four Notes, Matthew Guerrieri’s book on Beethoven’s Fifth.

Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.
radiolab_podcast20speedybeetrerun.mp3 (23:47, 22MB), popup

Source: http://www.wnycstudi.../269783-speedy-beet/