I made a "Shepard Beat" with an infinitely descending bass line.
A Shepard tone (or Shepard's tone) is an auditory / musical illusion discovered by Roger Shepard, which sounds like a perpetually rising or lowering frequency yet still staying in the same pitch range. It is achieved by superposition of same melodies separated by octaves with the volume fading in and out at the right time for each separate octave. That way you slowly stop hearing the lower octave while the higher one starts creeping in. The average human ear is not able to recognize this. The Shepherd tone is most commonly used in the form of a "Shepard scale", aka a consistently ascending / descending frequency creating an interesting effect. What I wanted to do was create a music piece or maybe a song where this was achieved not with a single monotone drone, but with the bassline. It is not at all uncommon for songs to have a descending bass line, but then the bass just jumps back up to repeat the sequence. This little loop I made is just like that, only there's not any kind of that audible "jump". And I intentionally made the "start of the beat", so to say, not correspond with the start of the chord progression, so that it is less noticeable, therefore strengthening the illusion of it getting lower forever. I hope you enjoy and maybe take inspiration from it. I might do an actual song with this later. This was created with a really old (but easy to use) software called SoundClub: http://www.bluemoon.ee/history/scwin/index.html and then slightly edited in Audacity: https://www.audacityteam.org/ :)
A Shepard tone (or Shepard's tone) is an auditory / musical illusion discovered by Roger Shepard, which sounds like a perpetually rising or lowering frequency yet still staying in the same pitch range. It is achieved by superposition of same melodies separated by octaves with the volume fading in and out at the right time for each separate octave. That way you slowly stop hearing the lower octave while the higher one starts creeping in. The average human ear is not able to recognize this. The Shepherd tone is most commonly used in the form of a "Shepard scale", aka a consistently ascending / descending frequency creating an interesting effect. What I wanted to do was create a music piece or maybe a song where this was achieved not with a single monotone drone, but with the bassline. It is not at all uncommon for songs to have a descending bass line, but then the bass just jumps back up to repeat the sequence. This little loop I made is just like that, only there's not any kind of that audible "jump". And I intentionally made the "start of the beat", so to say, not correspond with the start of the chord progression, so that it is less noticeable, therefore strengthening the illusion of it getting lower forever. I hope you enjoy and maybe take inspiration from it. I might do an actual song with this later. This was created with a really old (but easy to use) software called SoundClub: http://www.bluemoon.ee/history/scwin/index.html and then slightly edited in Audacity: https://www.audacityteam.org/ :)