cool looking wave effect in soundwave visualisation.

its called a cloud...its soundcloud's logo.

nah jus messing mate the track aint working!

---------- Post added at 19:45 ---------- Previous post was at 19:43 ----------

i retract my comment; it works now
 
Yeh i thought this the other week, there isnt any audible elements there that could make those waves, someone answer this as its well buggin me!

My only guess is really quiet white noise?!
 
i've asked a couple of house cats. they should know. i'll let you know once i've found out.

---------- Post added at 18:07 ---------- Previous post was at 17:14 ----------

i've asked a couple of house cats. they should know. i'll let you know once i've found out.

I spoke to my mate Rob Clarke, and sent him one of his own tunes with the effect on, he said it's level automation, but i don't really see how
it can be.

i'm still confused, personally i think the most obvious thing would be the attack and release of the master compression at this tempo, but
hopefully a Jedi will appear on here shorty and explain it to me :D
 
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It is an aliasing artifact, made by the software used to render the wav file on screen. It's not part of the audio, per se. It's a combination of the shape of the kick, and the bpm of the song (and also the zoom level of the soundcloud player)


As an experiment, I made a track of just a kick drum, at slowly increasing speed... like it? :)


It actually looks different, and more distinct, if you visit my tracks page: http://soundcloud.com/magpieindustries/tracks
I think the difference here is that the width of the wav display has changed.
 
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thanks again Innovine, i looked into it and you are spot on. it would seem as if it is a common phenomenon during digital to analogue conversion and is common when the audio contains frequencies over 16,000hz.
 
Not in this case... It wont matter what the frequency is, you could have only a 20hz wave in there and it'd produce weird patterns

what's happening is this (ill try explain it..)

The image you are looking at is made up of pixel columns. These are equally spaced out over the duration of the file, for instance, if the track is 5mins long (300 seconds), and the image is 600 pixels wide, it will examine the wav file every half second, and take the value there for the colouring of the pixel. So, it doesnt matter what in in the audio file, just what the value of the wav is at exactly 0, 0.5sec, 1sec, 1.5sec, 2sec and so on. If you put a kick at exactly each of these time points, you'll read out the very same value each time, resulting in a perfectly smooth image.

Of course, in the real world, the renderer is probably not working exactly like this, it may be looking at neighbouring points, or have floating point rounding errors, soundcloud run their own compression/transcoding and normalization and stuff, but the theory is roughly the same.

now, if you were to place a kick at 0sec, and the following one at 0.49999secs, what happens is that for the first, the renderer reads the wav and gets the very initial bit of the kick. When it looks at 0.5secs into the file, it reads a tiny bit later in the (next) kick. If the kicks are spaced out at 0.499999 seconds, each time the renderer draws a new column, it will read a tiny bit later in the kick sample each time. So in theory, you could see the actual kick wavform stretched out in the renderer if you got the timing exactly right. But as mentioned, in practice its probably not controllable.


Similar problems occur with audio sampling and resampling, if you have high enough frequencies they end up wrapping around and becoming lower again. This is traditional audio aliasing and it sounds nasty, but the visual aliasing is more intuitive I think.
 
wicked tune man! nice wave as well.

---------- Post added at 18:42 ---------- Previous post was at 18:41 ----------

oh is it not ur tune :(
 
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