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We can now hear the auditory analog of M.C Escher's Staircase: the "Shepard-Risset glissando", named after its makers. [sound sample here]
The trick here is that the sound contains four notes all an octave apart, with the loudness of each note sneakily adjusted as the pitch of the notes climbs.
To understand this trick better, here's a good visualization and demo of the discrete Shepard scale:
[Visualization of the Shepard Effect] and another sound sample of the glissando.
And on the other side of the spectrum, there's Spectrograms, pictures of sound over time. People use them to visualize waveforms, often to try to highlight musical relationships or sounds in speech.
You can go the other way, too, by drawing a picture in a spectrogram and playing the sound it represents. Several musicians have used this to hide pictures in their albums. In many cases, you'll hear some weird noise at the end of a track and when the waveform is put through a spectrum analyzer, you get the picture back.
NIN - Viral Marketing
Aphex Twin - Windowlicker
NIN - My Violent Heart
And my personal favourite:
Extract of Venetian Snares "Look" from the album "Songs about my Cats".
More cool/silly spectograms and tidbits @ http://www.bastwood.com/aphex.php.
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