Musical notes have a characteristic volume “envelope”—attack, decay, sustain, and release. The loudest part of the note is near the start, when some initial disturbance causes something to vibrate. The decay of the vibration is at least partly caused by the second law of thermodynamics: the energy of the vibration is being lost to the environment in the form of heat and sound, and the amplitude decreases exponentially with the energy.
If you play it in reverse, it sounds like the vibration is being fed energy from an external source and then abruptly cut off.
(This is more of an addendum than an elaboration, btw.)
And the cool part is that unusual sounds quickly start to sound not-weird, especially if they are played consistently.
EDM style music exploits this frequently. Many synth patterns (think acid-bass lines;which usually have little actual bass in themselves) are basically repeating patterns of random notes. The brain picks up on the measure repetition and bam! You have a new rhythm that doesn’t sound random at all. (This may sound unrelated, but stick with me a second.)
The brain will quickly adjust to strange sounds even if the initial pattern is odd. You can take practically any sound, reverse it, filter it, distort it or apply unusual envelopes but eventually, the brain locks onto it as a “normal” sound that essentially fits the pattern of a sound with a normal envelope. It’s all an illusion, of course. If you chop out all the other instruments for a brief second, it will return to sounding like something weird all over again, if only for a bit.
This phenomenon is something I have been fighting for years when writing music. (Just hobby stuff, though.) While there are a million-and-one other factors involved, hearing something for the first time never aligns with the sound I hear when playing the same few measures on repeat for 5-10 mins.
What something actually is and what the brain thinks it is hearing are two completely different things. Our brains will quickly fit almost any sound into what we expect “normal” to be. As a result, I’ll put some songs on hold for a month or longer just because my ears and brain become “dead” to a new sound I created.
Musical notes have a characteristic volume “envelope”—attack, decay, sustain, and release. The loudest part of the note is near the start, when some initial disturbance causes something to vibrate. The decay of the vibration is at least partly caused by the second law of thermodynamics: the energy of the vibration is being lost to the environment in the form of heat and sound, and the amplitude decreases exponentially with the energy.
If you play it in reverse, it sounds like the vibration is being fed energy from an external source and then abruptly cut off.
(This is more of an addendum than an elaboration, btw.)
And the cool part is that unusual sounds quickly start to sound not-weird, especially if they are played consistently.
EDM style music exploits this frequently. Many synth patterns (think acid-bass lines;which usually have little actual bass in themselves) are basically repeating patterns of random notes. The brain picks up on the measure repetition and bam! You have a new rhythm that doesn’t sound random at all. (This may sound unrelated, but stick with me a second.)
The brain will quickly adjust to strange sounds even if the initial pattern is odd. You can take practically any sound, reverse it, filter it, distort it or apply unusual envelopes but eventually, the brain locks onto it as a “normal” sound that essentially fits the pattern of a sound with a normal envelope. It’s all an illusion, of course. If you chop out all the other instruments for a brief second, it will return to sounding like something weird all over again, if only for a bit.
This phenomenon is something I have been fighting for years when writing music. (Just hobby stuff, though.) While there are a million-and-one other factors involved, hearing something for the first time never aligns with the sound I hear when playing the same few measures on repeat for 5-10 mins.
What something actually is and what the brain thinks it is hearing are two completely different things. Our brains will quickly fit almost any sound into what we expect “normal” to be. As a result, I’ll put some songs on hold for a month or longer just because my ears and brain become “dead” to a new sound I created.