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comment by pseydtonne
pseydtonne  ·  4334 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Vince Gurauldi's theme to Peanuts, slowed down 600%

Because it's probably playing the same chunks of sound six times in a row, thus blurring the stop and restart of the same sequence into a shimmering stutter. Those affects are not necessarily inherent in the performance.

The most common way to stretch out digital sound (such as an MP3 file) is to play it back with repeated sample plays. Imagine a song file were like a film, showing a discrete frame of music. Normally an MP3 player will simply grab the frame (or really grab the parts that make up a frame), play it once and move to the next frame. In this case, the frame is going on your aural "screen" six times, then do the same to the next frame.

This is unlike playing an analog tape, where you would simply slow down the tape and get lower frequencies. Instead you get the same notes over and over at the normal speed. In turn you're getting the sound waves wherever they started and stopped in each sample.

If I were digitally recording a spoken sentence, such as "Hey, welcome to the Internet", I would wind up with things like an aspiration (the "h" in "Hey"), a vowel transition (from "a" to the trailing "ee" in "Hey"), and so on. If I play that back with sample repetition, I get a lot of choppy "huh-huh-huh... ay-ay-ay... ayee-ayee-ayee...".

The tool "mpg321" has a simple flag for changing the sample repetition. Thus you can try this with any favorite song and have it suddenly turn into Rhys Chatham.





StephenBuckley  ·  4334 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Excellent! This really clears it up! I didn't even think of the sampling as a possible cause, but you're 100% correct. Awesome!

pseydtonne  ·  4334 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Thanks! I enjoyed writing it. I was trying to write what is infinitely easier to demonstrate.

Now I realize the simplest way to think of what we're hearing: piano keys being hit six times in a row. I'll bet something with faster piano work, such as Rhapsody in Blue, would really get jarring.